Temporal convolution network based novel parallel disaggregation method for non-intrusive monitoring of the appliances’ consumptions in residential buildings

Abstract

Energy or load disaggregation, as one essential part of non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM), is an efficient way to separate the consumption information of target appliances from the whole consumption data, and can accordingly help to regulate people’s energy consumption behaviors. However, the consumptions of the target appliances are usually affected by the variance of the opening time, working condition and user interference, so it is a difficult task to realize precise disaggregation. To further improve the energy disaggregation accuracy, this paper proposes a new parallel disaggregation strategy with two subnets for the energy consumption disaggregation of the target appliances in the residential buildings. In the proposed strategy, the parallel disaggregation network contains a long-term disaggregation network and a short-term disaggregation network, which can automatically and respectively learn the long-term trend features and short-term dynamic characteristics of the electrical appliances. This parallel structure can make full use of the advantages of different methods in feature extraction, so as to model the appliance features more comprehensively. To better extract the long-term and short-term features, in the long-term disaggregation subnet, we propose the double branch bi-directional temporal convolution network (DBB-TCN) which has a wider receptive field than the traditional temporal convolution networks (TCN), while in the short-term disaggregation subnet, we adopt the convolution auto-encoder to learn the short-term characteristics of the target appliances. Finally, detailed experiments and comparisons are made with two real-world datasets. Experimental results verified that the proposed parallel disaggregation method performs better than the existing methods under various evaluation criteria.