The key advantage of smart meters over traditional metering devices is their ability to transfer consumption information to remote data processing systems. Besides enabling the automated collection of a customer’s electricity consumption for billing purposes, the data collected by these devices makes the realization of many novel use cases possible. However, the large majority of such services are tailored to improve the power grid’s operation as a whole. For example, forecasts of household energy consumption or photovoltaic production allow for improved power plant generation scheduling. Similarly, the detection of anomalous consumption patterns can indicate electricity theft and serve as a trigger for corresponding investigations. Even though customers can directly influence their electrical energy consumption, the range of use cases to the users’ benefit remains much smaller than those that benefit the grid in general. In this work, we thus review the range of services tailored to the needs of end-customers. By briefly discussing their technological foundations and their potential impact on future developments, we highlight the great potentials of utilizing smart meter data from a user-centric perspective. Several open research challenges in this domain, arising from the shortcomings of state-of-the-art data communication and processing methods, are furthermore given. We expect their investigation to lead to significant advancements in data processing services and ultimately raise the customer experience of operating smart meters.

Smart meters are increasingly penetrating the market, resulting in enormous data volumes to be communicated. In many cases, embedded devices collect the metering data and transmit them wirelessly to achieve cheap and facile deployment. Bandwidth is yet scarce and transmission occupies the spectrum. Smart meter data should hence be compressed prior to transmission. Here, solutions for personal computers are not applicable, as they are too resource-demanding. In this paper, we propose four lossless compression algorithms for smart meters. We analyze processing time and compression gains and compare the results with five off-the-shelf compression algorithms. We show that excellent compression gains can be achieved when investing a moderate amount of memory. A discussion of the suitability of the algorithms for different kinds of metering data is presented.

The way humans and artificially intelligent machines interact is undergoing a dramatic change. This change becomes particularly apparent in domains where humans and machines collaboratively work on joint tasks or objects in teams, such as in industrial assembly or disassembly processes. While there is intensive research work on human–machine collaboration in different research disciplines, systematic and interdisciplinary approaches towards engineering systems that consist of or comprise human–machine teams are still rare. In this paper, we review and analyze the state of the art, and derive and discuss core requirements and concepts by means of an illustrating scenario. In terms of methods, we focus on how reciprocal trust between humans and intelligent machines is defined, built, measured, and maintained from a systems engineering and planning perspective in literature. Based on our analysis, we propose and outline three important areas of future research on engineering and operating human–machine teams for trusted collaboration. For each area, we describe exemplary research opportunities.

The presence of multimodal sensors on current mobile phones enables a broad range of novel mobile applications including, e.g., monitoring noise pollution or traffic and road conditions in urban environments. Data of unprecedented quantity and quality can be collected and reported by a possible user base of billions of mobile phone subscribers worldwide. The collection of detailed sensor and location data may however compromise user privacy. In this paper, we present a decentralized mechanism to preserve location privacy during the collection of sensor readings. As most sensor readings are geotagged, we propose to exchange them between users in physical proximity in order to jumble the paths followed by the users. We evaluate different strategies to exchange and report the sensor readings to the application using real-world GPS traces of mobile users. The results demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of our proposed scheme, which can obfuscate up to 100% of the visited locations in the best instances.

Today's solutions to inform residents about their electricity consumption are mostly confined to displaying aggregate readings collected at meter level. A reliable identification of appliances that require disproportionate amounts of energy for their operation is generally unsupported by these systems, or at least requires significant manual configuration efforts. We address this challenge by placing low-cost measurement and actuation units into the mains connection of appliances. The distributed sensors capture the current flow of individual appliances at a sampling rate of 1.6kHz and apply local signal processing to the readings in order to extract characteristic fingerprints. These fingerprints are communicated wirelessly to the evaluation server, thus keeping the required airtime and energy demand of the transmission low. The evaluation server employs machine learning techniques and caters for the actual classification of attached electric appliances based on their fingerprints, enabling the correlation of consumption data and the appliance identity. Our evaluation is based on more than 3,000 current consumption fingerprints, which we have captured for a range of household appliances. The results indicate that a high accuracy is achieved when locally extracted current consumption fingerprints are used to classify appliances.