Toward Energy-Awareness Smart Building: Discover the Fingerprint of Your Electrical Appliances

Energy efficiency raises significant concerns as it is one of the most promising ways to mitigate climate change. Disaggregation and identification of individual electrical appliances activities are one of the essentials for energy preservation especially for smart buildings. This paper proposes a lightweight electrical appliance activity detection approach for smart building, which leverages a single smart metering device to establish a learning and detection processing for multiple appliances. In this system, data interpolation and transition detection algorithm are proposed to effectively reduce the cost of model training and optimize the detection accuracy. The concept of appliance fingerprint is proposed and a variety of fingerprints, including appliance-based and context-based, are defined to depict fine-grained appliance characteristics. Based on these fingerprints, the paper proposes a multisource fingerprint-weighting KNN (FWKNN) classification algorithm and presents a boosting framework for continuous online learning and detection. A prototype system is implemented and demonstrated in IBM Bluemix PaaS cloud platform. Experimental result and analysis prove that FWKNN outperforms other benchmark methods in detection accuracy.