Non-intrusive load monitoring based on a combination of Transformer and CNN

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) estimates the energy usage of individual devices by analyzing the total power meter data from a household. To address the issue of decreased monitoring accuracy with an increasing number of electricity meters, this paper proposes a solution for single appliance load monitoring (Tra-CNN). The solution uses the UK-DALE dataset, which contains high and low frequencies electricity consumption data of multiple households in the UK and the electricity consumption data of each household appliance, and uses the active power of the appliance as the input of the algorithm. The first part of the model consists of a convolutional layer, a normalization layer, and a dropout layer, with the primary task of capturing local dependencies in the data. The second part consists of a Transformer, whose self-attention mechanism associates features at different positions in the sequence to achieve modeling of long-term dependencies. The third part introduces a convolutional neural network, which uses a sliding window for convolution operations to extract local features from different positions and further extract features from sequence data. The final decoder consists of a transposed convolutional layer and a normalization layer, designed to revert the learned features to their original dimensions. Through experimental verification, the effectiveness and superiority of Tra-CNN are shown, which provides important ideas and methods for the further development of NILM technology.