Appliance Signature and Energy Auditing for Sustainability - CityCom Technology Limited

Abstract

Sustainability, energy conservation and demand response have become an inevitable concern around the world. This project proposes a sustainable and all-round system which consists of three partitions, advanced metering infrastructure, energy auditing and appliance signature. Advanced metering infrastructure in smart grid composes of hundreds of smart meter which collect total energy consumption of each apartment to the utilities through wireless communication. It is first of its kind that a WiFi and ZigBee building area network of advanced metering infrastructure is designed to overcome the signal obstruction and heavy traffic loading inside the complex structure of building. An understanding of the specific load profile will intensively increase the energy saving awareness and strategy of end users. Thus, the proposed system has incorporated the sub-metering for energy auditing. For the development of energy auditing, ZigBee is utilized to cater for communication between the central server and automated sockets or light switches. The measurement of data is achieved by current transformers. The central server analyses the energy consumption of electric appliances (together with the household working hours) and generates the load profile. Local users can reduce the time of use of appliances with high electricity footprint in a judicious manner based on the load profile. Appliance signature is accompanied by energy auditing which classifies the type of end-user appliances without a prior knowledge. Multi-class support vector machine is newly employed for appliance signature with characteristics of a maximum margin classification with accuracy of 95%. It has improvement accuracy by 40.5% compared to traditional K-means algorithm. This provides an evidence for utilities in energy management according to the energy usage pattern. Based on this project, one journal paper has been published and two conference papers have been accepted. Also, the 2-Runners Up was awarded in the paper award competition organised by the HKIE CAD.