A Feature-Based Model for the Identification of Electrical Devices in Smart Environments

Smart Homes (SHs) represent the human side of a Smart Grid (SG). Data mining and analysis of energy data of electrical devices in SHs, e.g., for the dynamic load management, is of fundamental importance for the decision-making process of energy management both from the consumer perspective by saving money and also in terms of energy redistribution and reduction of the carbon dioxide emission, by knowing how the energy demand of a building is composed in the SG. Advanced monitoring and control mechanisms are necessary to deal with the identification of appliances. In this paper, a model for their automatic identification is proposed. It is based on a set of 19 features that are extracted by analyzing energy consumption, time usage and location from a set of device profiles. Then, machine learning approaches are employed by experimenting different classifiers based on such model for the identification of appliances and, finally, an analysis on the feature importance is provided.