Particle Swarm Optimization for Energy Disaggregation in Industrial and Commercial Buildings

Abstract: This paper provides a formalization of the energy disaggregation problem for particle swarm optimization and shows the successful application of particle swarm optimization for disaggregation in a multi-tenant commercial building. The developed mathmatical description of the disaggregation problem using a state changes matrix belongs to the group of non-event based methods for energy disaggregation. This work includes the development of an objective function in the power domain and the description of position and velocity of each particle in a high dimensional state space. For the particle swarm optimization, four adaptions have been applied to improve the results of disaggregation, increase the robustness of the optimizer regarding local optima and reduce the computational time. The adaptions are varying movement constants, shaking of particles, framing and an early stopping criterion. In this work we use two unlabelled power datasets with a granularity of 1 s. Therefore, the results are validated in the power domain in which good results regarding multiple error measures like root mean squared error or the percentage energy error can be shown.