Energy-Consumption Pattern-Detecting Technique for Household Appliances for Smart Home Platform

Abstract

Rising electricity prices and the greater penetration of electricity consumption in end-uses have prompted efforts to set up data-driven methodologies to optimise energy consumption and foster user engagement in demand-side management strategies. The performance of energy-management systems is greatly affected by the consumer behaviors and the adopted energy-management methodology. Consequently, it is necessary to develop appliance-level, detailed energy-consumption information models to inform citizens to improve behaviors toward energy use. The goal of the Home Energy Management System (HEMS) is to foster an ecosystem that is energy-optimized and can manage Internet of things (IoT) equipment over its network. HEMS allows consumers to reduce energy costs by adapting their consumption to variable pricing over the day. With the use of descriptive data-mining techniques, we have developed a numerical model that gives consumers access to information on their domestic appliances with regard to the number and duration of operations, cycles disaggregation for appliances that have cyclic operation (e.g., washing machine, dishwasher), and energy consumption throughout various time periods basing on 15-min monitoring data. The model has been calibrated and validated on two datasets collected by ENEA by real-time monitoring of Italian dwellings and has been tested over several appliances showing effective analysis of the energy-consumption patterns. Therefore, it has been integrated in the DHOMUS IoT platform, developed by ENEA to monitor and analyse the energy consumption in dwellings in order to increase citizens’ engagement and awareness of their energy consumption. The results indicate that the developed model is sufficiently accurate, and that it is possible to promote a more virtuous and sustainable use of energy by end users, as well as to reduce the energy demand as required by the current European Council Regulation (EU) 2022/1854.