The rapid development of technology in the electrical energy sector within the last 20 years has led to growing electric power needs through the increased number of electrical appliances and automation of tasks. In parallel the global climate protection goals, energy conservation and efficient energy management arise interest for reduction of the overall energy consumption. These requirements have led to the recent adoption of smart-meters and smart-grids, as well as to the rise of Load Monitoring (LM) using energy disaggregation, also referred to as Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM), which enables appliance-specific energy monitoring by only observing the aggregated energy consumption of a household. The real-time information on appliance level can be used to get deeper insights in the origin of energy consumption and to make optimization, strategic load scheduling and demand management feasible. The three main contributions are as follows: First, a generalized up-to-date review of NILM approaches including a high-level taxonomy of NILM methodologies is provided. Second, previously published results are grouped based on the experimental setup which allows direct comparison. Third, the article is accompanied by a software implementation of the described NILM approaches.

Microgrids are industrial technologies that can provide energy resources for the Internet of Things (IoT) demands in smart grids. Hybrid microgrids supply quality power to the IoT devices and ensure high resiliency in supply and demand for PV-based grid-tied microgrids. In this system, the usage of predictive energy management systems (EMS) is essential to dispatch power from different resources, while the battery energy storage system (BESS) is feeding the loads. In this article, we deploy a one-day-ahead prediction algorithm using a deep neural network for a fast-response BESS in an intelligent energy management system (I-EMS) that is called SIEMS . The main role of the SIEMS is to maintain the SOC at high rates based on the one-day-ahead information about solar power, which depends on meteorological conditions. The remaining power is supplied by the main grid for sustained power streaming between BESS and end-users. Considering the usage of information and communication technology components in the microgrids, the main objective of this article is focused on the hybrid microgrid performance under cyber-physical security adversarial attacks. Fast gradient sign, basic iterative, and DeepFool methods, which are investigated for the first time in power systems e.g., smart grid and microgrids, in order to produce perturbation for training data. To secure the microgrid’s SIEMS , we propose two Defence algorithms based on defensive distillation and adversarial training strategies for the first time in EMSs. We apply and evaluate these benchmark adversarial attack and Defence methods against the proposed machine learning models to increase the robustness of the models in the system against adversarial attacks.

In this paper we evaluate several well-known and widely used machine learning algorithms for regression in the energy disaggregation task. Specifically, the Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring approach was considered and the K-Nearest-Neighbours, Support Vector Machines, Deep Neural Networks and Random Forest algorithms were evaluated across five datasets using seven different sets of statistical and electrical features. The experimental results demonstrated the importance of selecting both appropriate features and regression algorithms. Analysis on device level showed that linear devices can be disaggregated using statistical features, while for non-linear devices the use of electrical features significantly improves the disaggregation accuracy, as non-linear appliances have non-sinusoidal current draw and thus cannot be well parametrized only by their active power consumption. The best performance in terms of energy disaggregation accuracy was achieved by the Random Forest regression algorithm.

In this article, we present a framework for automatic detection of logging activity in forests using audio recordings. The framework was evaluated in terms of logging detection classification performance and various widely used classification methods and algorithms were tested. Experimental setups, using different ratios of sound-to-noise values, were followed and the best classification accuracy was reported by the support vector machine algorithm. In addition, a postprocessing scheme on decision level was applied that provided an improvement in the performance of more than 1%, mainly in cases of low ratios of sound-to-noise. Finally, we evaluated a late-stage fusion method, combining the postprocessed recognition results of the three top-performing classifiers, and the experimental results showed a further improvement of approximately 2%, in terms of absolute improvement, with logging sound recognition accuracy reaching 94.42% when the ratio of sound-to-noise was equal to 20 dB.