Impressions from BuildSys 2013

The 5th ACM Workshop On Embedded Systems For Energy-Efficient Buildings (BuildSys) 2013 were hold from the 13th to 14th of November in Rome, where the two researcher Dominik Egarter and Andrea Monacchi participated in. According to the general BuildSys chair the Workshops' aims can be summarized as follows:

The entrance of La Sapienza University, Rome, where SenSys and BuildSys were held

"BuildSys is a venue for discussing new directions in the monitoring, control, and management of energy consumption in buildings, and the generation of awareness and sustainability for an efficient energy market. BuildSys brings together researchers from a multitude of disciplines with a common goal to develop energy saving strategies that can have a major impact worldwide. BuildSys 2013 follows four successful predecessors held in Berkeley, Zurich, Seattle, and Toronto."

This year the workshop had 7 different season such as:

• Energy Efficiency in Homes,
• Data Analysis,
• Occupancy Detection, Monitoring & Use,
• Sensing for Energy,
• Energy and Water,
• HVAC, Modeling and Control and
• Thermal Comfort Management,

Andrea and Dominik at their posters 

where in total 22 papers were presented. In addition to the general paper presentation, the workshop offers a poster and demo session, where 10 posters and 8 demos were presented. The Smart Grid Group not only visited workshop, Dominik and Andrea were presenting two posters. Dominik showed his current result of Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) techniques with the title Appliance State Estimation Based on Particle Filtering. In this paper he showed how it is possible to apply Particle Filtering to the problem of aggregated power loads and how beneficial this approach can be. Moreover, Andreas poster has the title Insert Coin: turning the household into a prepaid billing system and propose an approach for raising energy awareness by combining appliance-level consumption information with prepaid billing so as to turn appliances in pay-as-you-go devices.

D. Egarter, Venkata Pathuri Bhuvana, W. Elmenreich. Appliance State Estimation Based on Particle Filtering, 5th ACM Workshop on Embedded Systems For Energy-Efficient Buildings, Rome, Italy, 2013.

A. Monacchi, W. Elmenreich. Insert Coin: turning the household into a prepaid billing system,5th ACM Workshop on Embedded Systems For Energy-Efficient Buildings (BuildSys'13), Rome, Italy, 2013

Appliance State Estimation based on Particle Filtering

The load disaggregation problem

Dominik Egarter will present his work on Appliance State Estimation based on Particle Filtering at  the 5th ACM Workshop on Embedded Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings (BuildSys'13) which will take place in Rome, Italy at 13th and 14th October 2013.

Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring is a single-point metering approach to identify and to monitor household appliances according their appliance power characteristics. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised classification approach for appliance state estimation of on/off-appliances modeled by a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). To estimate the states of appliances, we use the sequential Monte Carlo or Particle Filtering (PF) method. The proposed algorithm is tested with MATLAB simulations and is evaluated according to correctly or incorrectly detected on/off events.
On other approaches for solving the NILM problem, see:

Particle filter method

Read more about the approach in:

D. Egarter, Venkata Pathuri Bhuvana, W. Elmenreich. Appliance State Estimation Based on Particle Filtering, 5th ACM Workshop on Embedded Systems For Energy-Efficient Buildings, Rome, Italy, 2013.

On other approaches for solving the NILM problem, see:

D. Egarter and W. Elmenreich. EvoNILM - Evolutionary appliance detection for miscellaneous household appliances. In Proceedings of the Green and Efficient Energy Applications of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation at the 2013 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2013 GreenGEC). ACM, July 2013.

D. Egarter, A. Sobe, and W. Elmenreich. Evolving non-intrusive load monitoring. In Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary and bio-inspired Computation, pages 182–191, Vienna, Austria, April 2013.