High-Reliability Load Recognition in Home Energy Management Systems.

The increasing domestic demand for electricity has required the scientific community to develop new technologies focused on energy expenditure minimization. In this context, Home Energy Management System (HEMS) is an element that can incorporate applications that aid in efficient energy management, such as load recognition. Load recognition allows HEMS to map all appliances, assisting in efficient management. In this regard, methods that solve the load recognition problem are vital for HEMS. The motivation of this work is to propose a novel system that enhances load recognition in HEMS applications. For this purpose, the proposed system contains an event detector stage based on the Wavelet transform and another stage for appliance identification consisting of two processing chains, one for high reliability and one for fast model training. The main novelties of our work are: (i) very-low training time via fast training processing chain, less than 1 second with $k$ -Nearest Neighbor (k-NN); (ii) the highest values for accuracy, F1, and the kappa index, 98.90%, 98.77%, and 0.9382, respectively, for the regularized Convolutional Neural Network (CNN-r) using the ‘Personalised Retrofit Decision Support Tools for UK Homes using Smart Home Technology’ (REFIT) dataset; (iii) this is the first paper employing CNN-r and Vision Transformer (ViT) for load recognition problem; and (iv) the approach is applicable in households without any restrictions, as long as training the models. Regarding the tested scenarios, the results reveal a very efficient strategy yielding accuracy values greater than 98% for the REFIT dataset and the Reference Energy Disaggregation Dataset (REDD). Finally, the proposed approach provides the highest performance compared to other methods available in the literature.