DualNILM: Energy Injection Identification Enabled Disaggregation with Deep Multi-Task Learning

Abstract: Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) offers a cost-effective method to obtain fine-grained appliance-level energy consumption in smart homes and building applications. However, the increasing adoption of behind-the-meter energy sources, such as solar panels and battery storage, poses new challenges for conventional NILM methods that rely solely on at-the-meter data. The injected energy from the behind-the-meter sources can obscure the power signatures of individual appliances, leading to a significant decline in NILM performance. To address this challenge, we present DualNILM, a deep multi-task learning framework designed for the dual tasks of appliance state recognition and injected energy identification in NILM. By integrating sequence-to-point and sequence-to-sequence strategies within a Transformer-based architecture, DualNILM can effectively capture multi-scale temporal dependencies in the aggregate power consumption patterns, allowing for accurate appliance state recognition and energy injection identification. We conduct validation of DualNILM using both self-collected and synthesized open NILM datasets that include both appliance-level energy consumption and energy injection. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that DualNILM maintains an excellent performance for the dual tasks in NILM, much outperforming conventional methods.