Evaluation of Deep Learning-Based Non-Intrusive Thermal Load Monitoring

Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM), which provides sufficient load for the energy consumption of an entire building, has become crucial in improving the operation of energy systems. Although NILM can decompose overall energy consumption into individual electrical sub-loads, it struggles to estimate thermal-driven sub-loads such as occupants. Previous studies proposed Non-Intrusive Thermal Load Monitoring (NITLM), which disaggregates the overall thermal load into sub-loads; however, these studies evaluated only a single building. The results change for other buildings due to individual building factors, such as floor area, location, and occupancy patterns; thus, it is necessary to analyze how these factors affect the accuracy of disaggregation for accurate monitoring. In this paper, we conduct a fundamental evaluation of NITLM in various realistic office buildings to accurately disaggregate the overall thermal load into sub-loads, focusing on occupant thermal load. Through experiments, we introduce NITLM with deep learning models and evaluate these models using thermal load datasets. These thermal load datasets are generated by a building energy simulation, and its inputs for the simulation were derived from realistic data like HVAC on/off data. Such fundamental evaluation has not been done before, but insights obtained from the comparison of learning models are necessary and useful for improving learning models. Our experimental results shed light on the deep learning-based NITLM models for building-level efficient energy management systems.