An intelligent non-intrusive load monitoring model based on power encoding and convolutional state modules

Abstract Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) identifies device power consumption or on/off states solely based on total power data, which is highly valuable for consumers to understand their appliance usage behavior and take necessary measures to reduce energy consumption, especially for the benefit of energy consumers’ living production. However, a challenge faced by NILM is the tendency to focus excessively on power disaggregation while neglecting the disaggregation of on/off states, leading to lower classification accuracy, particularly owning to imbalanced states. This study proposes a model that integrates the power and on/off states to simultaneously disaggregate the power and device on/off states. The model comprises two main modules: a power encoding module for power disaggregation, and a convolutional state module (CSM) for on/off state disaggregation. The power encoding module utilizes BERT-LSTM and long short-term memory networks for initial energy disaggregation. In contrast, the CSM employs convolutional neural networks for device state disaggregation. The output of the power-encoding module is multiplied by the probability of on/off states to obtain the final power. The proposed model is evaluated using the REDD and UK-DALE datasets. Compared to the baseline models, the results show an improvement in the device state classification average accuracy from 0.948 to 0.957, and a decrease in the average error between the real power and disaggregated power from 26.356 W to 25.108 W. Additionally, real-world experiments conducted using the designed platform for collecting and disaggregating power data achieve an average accuracy of 0.997. The proposed model demonstrates competitiveness in the NILM field and underscores its significance in aiding energy-consumption reduction efforts.