A Parallel Evolutionary Computing-Embodied Artificial Neural Network Applied to Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring for Demand-Side Management in a Smart Home: Towards Deep Learning

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) is a cost-effective approach that electrical appliances are identified from aggregated whole-field electrical signals, according to their extracted electrical characteristics, with no need to intrusively deploy smart power meters (power plugs) installed for individual monitored electrical appliances in a practical field of interest. This work addresses NILM by a parallel Genetic Algorithm (GA)-embodied Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for Demand-Side Management (DSM) in a smart home. An ANN’s performance in terms of classification accuracy depends on its training algorithm. Additionally, training an ANN/deep NN learning from massive training samples is extremely computationally intensive. Therefore, in this work, a parallel GA has been conducted and used to integrate meta-heuristics (evolutionary computing) with an ANN (neurocomputing) considering its evolution in a parallel execution relating to load disaggregation in a Home Energy Management System (HEMS) deployed in a real residential field. The parallel GA that involves iterations to excessively cost its execution time for evolving an ANN learning model from massive training samples to NILM in the HEMS and works in a divide-and-conquer manner that can exploit massively parallel computing for evolving an ANN and, thus, reduce execution time drastically. This work confirms the feasibility and effectiveness of the parallel GA-embodied ANN applied to NILM in the HEMS for DSM.