Disaggregation of home energy display data using probabilistic approach

Home energy displays are emerging home energy management devices. Their energy saving potential is limited, because most display whole-home electricity consumption data. We propose a new approach to disaggregation electricity consumption by individual appliances and/or end uses that would enhance the effectiveness of home energy displays. The proposed method decomposes a system of appliance models into tuplets of appliances overlapping in power draw. Each tuplet is disaggregated using a modified Viterbi algorithm. In this way, the complexity of the disaggregation algorithm is linearly proportional to the number of appliances. The superior accuracy of the method is illustrated by a simulation example and by actual household data.