Towards Low-Cost Energy Monitoring

Author(s):  
Aqeel H. Kazmi ◽  
Michael J. O'Grady ◽  
Gregory M.P. O' Hare

A number of energy problems including limited energy resources, increased energy demand, and rising energy prices, have motivated energy conservation in the residential and commercial sectors. Access to real-time energy usage information is perceived as a prerequisite for energy usage reductions. A variety of computational approaches have been proposed to monitor energy usage within buildings. Currently, Non-intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) is perceived as the most cost-effective and scalable solution. In this article, a technological profile of this technique is constructed through the provision of key background developments, revision of existing solutions, consideration of outstanding problems, and identification of some pertinent future research directions.

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-119
Author(s):  
Colleen M. Boland ◽  
Chris E. Hogan ◽  
Marilyn F. Johnson

SYNOPSIS Mandatory existence disclosure rules require an organization to disclose a policy's existence, but not its content. We examine policy adoption frequencies in the year immediately after the IRS required mandatory existence disclosure by nonprofits of various governance policies. We also examine adoption frequencies in the year of the subsequent change from mandatory existence disclosure to a disclose-and-explain regime that required supplemental disclosures about the content and implementation of conflict of interest policies. Our results suggest that in areas where there is unclear regulatory authority, mandatory existence disclosure is an effective and low cost regulatory device for encouraging the adoption of policies desired by regulators, provided those policies are cost-effective for regulated firms to implement. In addition, we find that disclose-and-explain regulatory regimes provide stronger incentives for policy adoption than do mandatory existence disclosure regimes and also discourage “check the box” behavior. Future research should examine the impact of mandatory existence disclosure rules in the year that the regulation is implemented. Data Availability: Data are available from sources cited in the text.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (15) ◽  
pp. 4649
Author(s):  
İsmail Hakkı ÇAVDAR ◽  
Vahit FERYAD

One of the basic conditions for the successful implementation of energy demand-side management (EDM) in smart grids is the monitoring of different loads with an electrical load monitoring system. Energy and sustainability concerns present a multitude of issues that can be addressed using approaches of data mining and machine learning. However, resolving such problems due to the lack of publicly available datasets is cumbersome. In this study, we first designed an efficient energy disaggregation (ED) model and evaluated it on the basis of publicly available benchmark data from the Residential Energy Disaggregation Dataset (REDD), and then we aimed to advance ED research in smart grids using the Turkey Electrical Appliances Dataset (TEAD) containing household electricity usage data. In addition, the TEAD was evaluated using the proposed ED model tested with benchmark REDD data. The Internet of things (IoT) architecture with sensors and Node-Red software installations were established to collect data in the research. In the context of smart metering, a nonintrusive load monitoring (NILM) model was designed to classify household appliances according to TEAD data. A highly accurate supervised ED is introduced, which was designed to raise awareness to customers and generate feedback by demand without the need for smart sensors. It is also cost-effective, maintainable, and easy to install, it does not require much space, and it can be trained to monitor multiple devices. We propose an efficient BERT-NILM tuned by new adaptive gradient descent with exponential long-term memory (Adax), using a deep learning (DL) architecture based on bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT). In this paper, an improved training function was designed specifically for tuning of NILM neural networks. We adapted the Adax optimization technique to the ED field and learned the sequence-to-sequence patterns. With the updated training function, BERT-NILM outperformed state-of-the-art adaptive moment estimation (Adam) optimization across various metrics on REDD datasets; lastly, we evaluated the TEAD dataset using BERT-NILM training.


2022 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhongkui Wang ◽  
Shinichi Hirai ◽  
Sadao Kawamura

Despite developments in robotics and automation technologies, several challenges need to be addressed to fulfill the high demand for automating various manufacturing processes in the food industry. In our opinion, these challenges can be classified as: the development of robotic end-effectors to cope with large variations of food products with high practicality and low cost, recognition of food products and materials in 3D scenario, better understanding of fundamental information of food products including food categorization and physical properties from the viewpoint of robotic handling. In this review, we first introduce the challenges in robotic food handling and then highlight the advances in robotic end-effectors, food recognition, and fundamental information of food products related to robotic food handling. Finally, future research directions and opportunities are discussed based on an analysis of the challenges and state-of-the-art developments.


Insects ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 738
Author(s):  
Cynthia L. Goodman ◽  
David S. Kang ◽  
David Stanley

Innate immune responses are essential to maintaining insect and tick health and are the primary defense against pathogenic viruses, bacteria, and fungi. Cell line research is a powerful method for understanding how invertebrates mount defenses against pathogenic organisms and testing hypotheses on how these responses occur. In particular, immortal arthropod cell lines are valuable tools, providing a tractable, high-throughput, cost-effective, and consistent platform to investigate the mechanisms underpinning insect and tick immune responses. The research results inform the controls of medically and agriculturally important insects and ticks. This review presents several examples of how cell lines have facilitated research into multiple aspects of the invertebrate immune response to pathogens and other foreign agents, as well as comments on possible future research directions in these robust systems.


Author(s):  
Hamed Nabizadeh Rafsanjani

Detailed energy-use information of office buildings’ occupants is necessary to implement proper simulation/intervention techniques. However, acquiring accurate occupant-specific energy consumption in office buildings at low cost is currently a challenging task since existing intrusive load monitoring (ILM) technologies require a large capital investment to provide high-resolution electricity usage data for individual occupants. On the other hand, non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) approaches have been proven as more cost effective and flexible approaches to provide energy-use information of individual appliances. Therefore, extending the concept of NILM to individual occupants would be beneficial. This paper proposes two occupancy-related energy-consuming features, delay interval and magnitude of power changes and evaluates their significances for extracting occupant-specific power changes in a non-intrusive manner. The proposed features were examined through implementing a logistic regression model as a predictor on aggregate energy load data collected from an office building. Hypotheses tests also confirmed that both features are statistically significant to non-intrusively derive individual occupants’ energy-use information. As the main contribution of this study, these features could be utilized in developing sophisticated NILM-based approaches to monitor individual occupant energy-consuming behavior.  


Author(s):  
Monty McNair ◽  
Caroline Howard ◽  
Indira Guzman ◽  
Paul Watkin

Since the dawn of humanity, creativity has been critical to surmounting the challenges of life. Innovation is particularly essential to survival on every level from an individual solving his/her problems to a world dependent on adaptive approaches to cope with rapidly expanding populations and enormous international tensions. Currently, information systems programs are not fostering the creativity needed to sustain the innovation required to compete in the 21st century marketplace. Educators and researchers need to better understand the effects of creativity training on creative performance to best design programs that meet the needs of information systems personnel and their employers. The results of this study provide evidence that it would be valuable for organizations to experiment with creativity tutorials and recommend that future research be conducted using larger samples of individuals with low levels of creativity. Because the costs of informing people about creativity are low and creativity tutorials can be designed to be easily administered and completed, the authors recommend that a low-cost tutorial would be a cost effective and beneficial strategy for organizations to employ with information systems personnel, especially those who assess themselves as low in creativity.


Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (8) ◽  
pp. 1793 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yousaf Bin Zikria ◽  
Sung Won Kim ◽  
Oliver Hahm ◽  
Muhammad Khalil Afzal ◽  
Mohammed Y. Aalsalem

Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly growing and contributing drastically to improve the quality of life. Immense technological innovations and growth is a key factor in IoT advancements. Readily available low cost IoT hardware is essential for continuous adaptation of IoT. Advancements in IoT Operating System (OS) to support these newly developed IoT hardware along with the recent standards and techniques for all the communication layers are the way forward. The variety of IoT OS availability demands to support interoperability that requires to follow standard set of rules for development and protocol functionalities to support heterogeneous deployment scenarios. IoT requires to be intelligent to self-adapt according to the network conditions. In this paper, we present brief overview of different IoT OSs, supported hardware, and future research directions. Therein, we provide overview of the accepted papers in our Special Issue on IoT OS management: opportunities, challenges, and solution. Finally, we conclude the manuscript.


2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (5) ◽  
pp. 996-1013 ◽  
Author(s):  
John D. Pisaniello

In Australia and other countries, small private dams in agricultural catchments pose both disastrous individual and cumulative dam failure flood threats to downstream communities; threats that can be exacerbated by increased rainfall intensities caused by climate change. This paper addresses the need for a low cost, scientifically acceptable mechanism and policy guidance to help dam owners and governments better understand and manage these risks and assure community safety. To this end an innovative, cost-effective farm dam flood safety review/design tool is developed and tested in Australia, including hydrology-diverse Tasmania, to complement best practice dam safety assurance policy. The tool's development involved generating complex catchment data to represent hydrologically homogenous regions using best practice water engineering methods, to derive simple regionalised dam flood capability prediction relationships of acceptable accuracy. Results demonstrate the tool's successful development and potential transferability to different hydrological regions; how the relationships can be refined by future research and potentially made to account for climate change; and how the tool can be applied within a best practice dam safety assurance policy which includes additional farmer-friendly elements. The findings are potentially transferable to any region to assure communities that cumulative safety threats posed by rural catchment dams are minimised.


2010 ◽  
Vol 436 ◽  
pp. 131-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph W. Bruce ◽  
Arne W. Fliflet ◽  
Hugo E. Huey ◽  
Chad Stephenson ◽  
M. Ashraf Imam

The emerging reduction technologies for titanium from ore produce powder instead of sponge. Conventional methods for sintering and melting of titanium powder are costly, as they are energy intensive and require high vacuum, 10-6 Torr or better, since titanium acts as a getter for oxygen at high temperature, adversely affecting mechanical properties. Other melting processes such as plasma arcs have the additional problem of electrode consumption, and direct induction heating of the titanium powder is problematic. Microwave sintering or melting in an atmospheric pressure argon gas environment is potentially cost effective and energy efficient due to the possibility of direct microwave heating of the titanium powder augmented by hybrid heating in a ceramic casket. We are investigating this approach at the Naval Research Laboratory using an S–Band microwave system. The experimental setup and the results of melting and sintering experiments will be described including a rough estimate of energy usage.


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