My submission to the Imperial College Energy and Performance Colloquium 2012 has been accepted. It’s just an extended abstract which briefly outlines some ideas for my PhD research.

The paper is:

  • Kelly J, Knottenbelt W. Disaggregating Multi-State Appliances from Smart Meter Data. Imperial College Energy and Performance Colloquium. 29 May - 1 June 2012.  PDF

Abstract:

Smart electricity meters record the aggregate consumption of an entire building.  However, appliance-level information is more useful than aggregate data for a variety of purposes including energy management and load forecasting. Disaggregation aims to decompose an aggregate signal into appliance-by-appliance information.

Existing disaggregation systems tend to perform well for single-state appliances like toasters but perform less well for multi-state appliances like dish washers and tumble driers.

In this paper, we propose an expressive probabilistic graphical modelling framework with two main design aims: 1) to represent and disaggregate multi-state appliances and 2) to use as many features from the smart meter signal as possible to maximise disaggregation performance.