A Low-cost Non-intrusive Appliance Load Monitoring System

Supratim Das, Srikrishna, Ankita Shukla, GNS Harsha

Department of Electronics & Communications Engineering Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology - Delhi New Delhi, India {Supratim12107,Srikrishna12106,Ankita1292,Narayana129 4}@iiitd.ac.in
Abstract The major problem in current day's scenario is the increasing power consumption and vastly decreasing energy resources, especially in developing countries like India. This calls for a dire need to properly monitor power usage and take necessary steps to optimize the usage. To achieve this goal, a proper system needs to be developed that can provide the energy requirements and usage at all levels and build automating systems that reduce the unnecessary usage and losses. Towards this goal, we try to design a architecture which generate models for power usage in real time and that requires the minimal amount to changes to existing structures. KeywordsEnergy management, non-intrusive, event driven framework

Sujay Deb
Department of Electronics & Communications Engineering Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology - Delhi New Delhi, India sdeb@iiitd.ac.in

The Smart Grid system tries to approach the issue by having a two way communication with the appliances and monitor its usage and automate methods to reduce the consumption. It has a potential to be used as a management and automation network tool, but two issues impede the deployment this system. First, it needs a way to communicate with the household appliances which require either manufacturing new devices with communication modules built in or significant changes are needed to existing devices. Hence it is very intrusive in nature of its implementation. The ACME power management UCLA uses a acme metering node and control interface to each outlet and a network fabric that transmits the power data to the endpoints and an application software to provide power-centric applications. The acme meter node is plug-in module that needs to be interfaced for each device at the switch level. It contains p o w e r m e a s u r i n g n o d e s a n d n e t w o r k m o d u l e t o communicate with internet. It uses an IPv4 protocol to transmit and r ec e i v e d a t a . This approach i s less intrusive compared to the smart grid system as it does not require any changes to existing appliances but significant changes need to be made to the infrastructure as nodes need to be integrated for each device. Also it requires a networking infrastructure for its operation which impedes its implementation to remote areas. The main issue the existing methods face is the intrusive nature of the systems and economic constraints for large scale implementation. Our approach tries to solve these two issues by designing a non-intrusive low-cost system that meets the necessary requirements of energy management systems. We try to do this by building sensor networks that does not need any change to the existing infrastructure. Non-Intrusive Application Load Monitoring is one such viable alternative to the existing systems. III. NON INTRUSIVE APPLIANCE LOAD MONITORING In a NALM system, the power consumption is measured at the main breaker level rather than measuring the power at the device level for each device. This is the main change in the approach to monitoring the application power consumptions as it reduces a lot of external modules needed to measure device level power that are used in other approaches to the problem.

I.

INTRODUCTION

Increasing power requirements and environmental effects of the current energy resources has garnered significant need for optimizing energy consumption. Unnecessary and illegal power usage adds to the exiting woes of energy requirements. These issues call for a system that can actively monitor and manage the energy needs and automation systems that prevent unnecessary losses. But the existing systems that monitor the energy needs are passive in nature and lack ways to tackle data in real time. They are also very expensive to deploy. Our project aims to solve some of these issues at a low-cost design and that can be easily deployed. The proposed approach records total power consumption and from that derives the power consumption signature for different appliances. This device level consumption information can help proper planning at the grid level. Also this information will equip users to participate in the progress of building an energy conscious society. This is a unique work targeted towards solving Indian power issues. II. LITERATURE REVIEW There exist ways currently that try to solve the energy management needs like Smart Grid [1] System and ACME Power Management UCLA [2]. But they lack in practical implementations in real world cases or very expensive to implement and maintain.

978-1-4673-4529-3/12/$31.00 c 2012 IEEE

1641

This reduces a lot of expense required in implementing such systems and makes the system less intrusive. The major part of deploying such systems involves interfacing the existing power measuring devices to the NALM system. This total power consumption measured is used in conjunction with various algorithms that are developed to model the device level usage information to get the required data regarding the power usages. Based on these data models, the device level itemized power rating and energy consumptions are obtained and further used to take necessary actions. A. Advantages of NALM The features of the NALM approach and the advantages it provides are as follows: 1) Inexpensive: As the modules that are required to deploy are less and are non-intrusive in nature, the cost of deploying the system is significantly low since almost less modifications need to be made to the already installed structures. 2) Robust: As the modules deployed at the device level are less, the system can be designed to be robust enough to handle any new devices added after the system has been deployed. 3) Itemized power and energy: By using the characterization models, the power and energy consumptions can be itemized and represented in required formats based on type of devices, locations based, time based, etc. 4) Permanently switched on devices: The System is designed to handle devices that are continuously on, like AC, that have constant active power and model their device usage information. 5) Variable power consumption devices: Devices that consume different powers without any particular pattern (like refrigerators) can also be modeled using this system by proper design of the system.

9) Load balancing: The system can also balance the load across various devices to route the necessary power to the required systems. B. Challenges associated with NALM The first and most important criteria to be met are that the system itself should not consume more power. It should be designed as such it should load the existing structure. The system should be able to handle the fluctuations in the main power supply and should not model these variations as device usages. This particularly poses issues in developing countries like India where there are huge fluctuations in the power supplies. The system should require as less user intervention as possible for proper working. The system should be more like a onetime installation. An important criterion to meet is that the system can be made to handle new devices added at a later point of time after the installation of the system. The installation of the system should be made as easy as possible with both less user work and less modifications to the existing infrastructures. C. The Proposed NALM Implementation The proposed to NALM architecture is a micro-controller based event-driven system that is broadly divided into 5 modules. First a digital power measuring meter measures the total power at the main breaker level and a device monitoring system finds the current status of the all devices and sends the data to a micro-controller. An event based firmware framework is developed which provides an abstraction layer over the hardware and provides intuitive programming interface. Generally microcontroller based systems are limited by their processing power and low memory, which limits concurrency in code. But the very nature of the problem requires some amount of concurrency as various process parameters needs to be monitored and processed data to be logged in real time. The firmware framework supports this by careful use of timers and interrupt based priority scheduling. The hardware was designed so that it has minimum chip count and cost, so the USB interface is also implemented in the firmware using Obdevs V-USB firmware only USB driver for AVR microcontrollers. In the application code runs in two modes analysis and usage. Analysis code creates a statistical profile of each device based on power consumption during device switches, while usage code computes device level power consumption based on the previous statistical data from analysis. The information extracted is either displayed on an LCD or sent to a PC system for further processing. Figure 1 and 2 shows the overview of the architecture and the process flow of the system:

6) On-off devices: The system also easily handles the devices that switch on and off and consume average power when switched on. 7) Usage patterns: The system also can model the usage patterns based on the required criteria and it can also be made robust enough to add new usage pattern models as required. 8) Optimization of power: The system c a n b e made intelligent enough to suggest optimization of power consumption based on usage patterns and even implement them automatically at times.

1642

2013 3rd IEEE International Advance Computing Conference (IACC)

2) Usage Mode Usage Mode is the actual computational implementation that actively monitors load from various appliances and extracts the necessary information from the usage models characterized by the analysis mode. It extracts the necessary information from the data as needed by the user and represents it in the required formats. The information can be modeled as time based usage patterns, device type based usage patterns, location or season based representations or any other application specific needs. 3) Hardware Implementation
Fig. 1. Overview of the NALM Architecture

The hardware consists of sensor networks for the devices, micro-controller based central node and output devices LCD and PC.

Initialize framework

Measure power consumption across home device switch event Analysis of devices done? yes Usage mode measures device level power consumption Log data in a predefined format
Fig. 2. Process Flow of the Event Driven System

no

Analysis mode
Fig. 3. Electric field sensor

Model device level usage information

The Sensor networks detect the device switch on or off status. They can be implemented as E-field detectors, current transformer circuits, hall-effect sensors. For this project, we have implemented the sensors using an optical sensor that converts electrical changes from device to an optical output. The micro-controller is implemented using an ATMEGA16 [3]system as shown in Figure 4. An event based program is implemented in the micro-controller which decides the mode of operation based on the requirement criteria. The software framework that is used in the device is shown in Fig. 5.

1) Analysis Mode Analysis Mode is a self-learning approach in which the system processes the data available to i t and tries to characterize the device usage models. This makes the system intelligent as it tries to learn and understand usage patterns based on real time data. Analysis mode implementations are done using AI based approaches. In this approach, the total power measured and the device switching statuses are monitored and the usage models are generated. Analysis mode is internal to the system and does not need any intervention. Once the analysis is done, the system automatically switches to usage mode.
Fig. 4. Controller hardware

2013 3rd IEEE International Advance Computing Conference (IACC)

1643

NALM APPLICATION CODE ANALYSIS

i n i t i a l i z e

USAGE

Service calls

Event callback

Data log USB HID driver

LCD driver

Timestamp manager & scheduler

Device switch event framework

NALM FIRMWARE FRAMEWORK

Fig. 6 : Results logged as text data into a File Fig. 5. Event driven framework to schedule the device modes

IV. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK The architecture is partially built with basic controller hardware operating on an event driven framework. The models characterized and the results obtained are within 3% error margin of the actual usages. With proper implementation, this architecture offers many advantages at much lower costs and can even be used to curb illegal power usages which is especially requires immediate attention in developing countries like India. Since the system is working on single device switching at a time and under few practical assumptions, the architecture needs to be scaled to higher levels to be put in use of practical purposes. The scale of the system needs to be increased to handle more devices and multiple switching statuses. Since the sensors are connected directly to the control node, the implementation is confined to limited area and hence dedicated wireless communication modules are needed in the future.
REFERENCES

D. Experimetal Setup The experimental setup consists of a 4-device sensory network connected to power outlets. The outputs of sensors are fed into the micro-controller through ADCs. The microcontroller displays the current status and power readings of the devices on the lcd display. It also writes the usage data into files through the PC. In this case, it emulates a keyboard device connected to a PC. On initialization, the system starts in analysis mode. As the devices are switched on and off, the system monitors the power usages and analyzes it. For testing purposes and without loss of generality, 10 power readings for each device are assumed to give a precise usage model for that device. Till this information is obtained, the system operates in analysis mode and once it is done, it enters usage mode. Now whenever a device switches its state, the average usage of that device is written to the system files and the data is saved. The results are logged as the total energy consumed by the devices from the time the system is started into a document file in a PC. The sample result for the four devices is shown in Fig. 6:

[1] S. Park, H. Kim, H. Moon, J. Heo, S.Yoon, Concurrent SimulationPlatform for Energy-Aware Smart Metering Systems, IEEE Trans. [2] Xiaofan Jiang, Stephen Dawson-Haggerty, Prabal Dutta, and David Culler, " Design and Implementation of a High-Fidelity AC Metering Network" [3] ATMEGA16Micro-Controller http://www.atmel.com/Images/doc2466.pdf

1644

2013 3rd IEEE International Advance Computing Conference (IACC)