A method for recognizing electrical appliances based on active load demand in a house/office environment

Analysis of the electricity consumption habits of users is of great importance in demand response based load management. Load identification is an effective approach to analyze the electricity consumption habits based on historical/real-time load data. A non-intrusive load identification method based on active load demand in a house/office environment is proposed in this paper. The aim of the method is to recognize the working states of all electrical appliances in a house/office environment based only on the total active load demand. This is completed by a two-step procedure. In the first step, the original load curve with transient state change is regulated and transformed into a stepwise load curve which can reflect the characteristics of steady states of the appliances more clearly. In the second step, an integer programming based method is presented to recognize the working states of all electrical appliances. The method proposed in this paper is easy to implement and without requirements of more detailed load information. Numerical testing is also performed and the results show that the method is efficient.