Detecting Consumer Devices by Applying Pattern Recognition to Smart Meter Signals

Future energy supply requires an intelligent load management for efficient distribution of the available energy, at national level, as well as on a regional scale. For this purpose, one necessary prerequisite is the immediate detection of the currently connected appliances (loads), for example white or brown goods. If the devices that are currently active at the time of a data point are known, it is possible to level the load curve by means of selectively connecting and disconnecting appliances, which results in an optimized usage of the available energy. To realize the measurement of the energy consumption, we devised a low-investment system for centralized data acquisition and recorded and digitized characteristic load profiles. Afterwards, the application of different pattern matching algorithms allowed for recognizing and assigning individual loads from the measured sum signal. In the course of laboratory experiments, we could identify individual appliances and their combinations with this system.