Electrical Energy Management Based on a Hybrid Artificial Neural Network-Particle Swarm Optimization-Integrated Two-Stage Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring Process in Smart Homes

Concerning electrical energy used in today's modern society, electrical energy demands requested from downstream sectors in a smart grid are continuously increasing. One way to meet the electrical demands requested is to monitor and manage industrial, commercial, as well as residential electrical appliances efficiently in response to Demand Response (DR) programs for Demand-Side Management (DSM). Monitoring and managing electrical appliances that consume electrical energy in fields of interest can be realized through use of Energy Management Systems (EMS) with Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM). This paper presents an Internet of Things (IoT)-oriented Home EMS (HEMS). Also, a novel hybrid Artificial Neural Network-Particle Swarm Optimization (ANN-PSO)-integrated NILM approach is proposed and used to model and identify electrical appliances for DSM in the HEMS. ANN can be applied in NILM as a load identification task. Nevertheless, the performance of ANN used for load identification depends on three principal design factors: The network topology designed, the type of activation functions chosen, and the training algorithm adopted. As a result, PSO is conducted and used to incorporate meta-heuristics with ANN considering the three principal design factors relating to an ANN design. The HEMS with the novel hybrid ANN-PSO-integrated NILM proposed in this paper was deployed and evaluated in a realistic residential house environment. As the experimentation reported in this paper shows, the presented HEMS utilizing the proposed novel hybrid ANN-PSO-integrated NILM to model and identify monitored electrical appliances is feasible and workable, with an overall classification rate of 91.67% in load classification for DSM.