Thesis Topic: Automatic end-consumer device recognition
Currently, the shift towards an energy consumption awareness is on the rise, thanks to the increase of e-Mobility and also, especially in bigger citys, e-Scooters.
But the consumption of daily household utilities and devices are still unknown to many customers. Many reasons can be found (pre-installed devices, e.g. in the kitchen), devices that have been gifts, etc.
With the help of a measurement device and machine learning, this problem is about to be solved.
In cooperation with a StartUp the Diploma Thesis should tackle one of the following highly interesting research questions:
- Recognition of electrical components like motors, heaters (water/air), different power supplies, different lamp types, etc. from their power usage characteristics without prior training.
- Research questions:
- finding attributes of electricity consumption that make components of electrical appliances identifiable
- what are the minimum required attributes that allow high confidence recognition with the focus on broad end customer usage
- Attributes: sampling frequency, amplitude resolution, dimensions (W, VAR, CosPhi, Hz, V, …)
- Research questions:
- Recognition of device types, brands and models from their power usage trace.
- Research questions:
- High quality prediction of pre-trained appliances in live sampling data – validation with customer feedback and annotations
- Expand the state of the art from 5-7 appliances that can be distinguished to a typical size of a household: 50+
- Research questions:
- Recognition and device isolation with complex programs such as dish washers, washing machines or heat pumps – executed in the live data feed of the power usage recording.
- Research questions:
- Customer view: „Which program of my dish washer is the most efficient one“
- Expand software stack to allow annotations and analysis of different program modes per device
- Isolate and recognize program specific power usage of the device
- Research questions:
- OCR and image recognition to allow the user to take a photo of a device and it’s type plate instead of typing model, make, type into the system manually.
- Research question:
- State of the Art Research
- Create UX design for close to zero effort device identification
- Identify and integrate device definition repositories for validation and enrichment
- Research question:
Technical environment for thesis work:
- Installation of power meter at students home preferable
- Access to anonymized data of Watt Analytics customers via REST API
- Development Environment
- Java 1.8, Spring Framework 2.1
- Apache Storm for Analytics Pipeline
- PostgreSQL, time series DB to be selected and implemented
- JSON over MQTT for data transport
- React for web and mobile apps
- Cloud Deployment on Heroku
- GIT Source Repository
- Agile Tools: Jira, Bamboo, Confluence
Close cooperation for software development with the StartUp is encouraged and welcomed. Real world data can be provided by the StartUp.