Review of advances in scaling non-intrusive load monitoring for real-world applications

Qingquan Luo, Tao Yu, Minhang Liang, Zhenning Pan, Wenlong Guo and Xiaolei Hu

Applied Energy, 2025, vol. 398, issue C, No S0306261925011924

Abstract: Sustainable and safe electricity usage is essential to making electrification more environmentally and human-friendly. The first step is to make fine-grained electricity consumption data readily available. Recently, non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) has gained attention for estimating appliance-level electricity usage only from aggregated measurements, offering a cost-effective solution for large-scale electricity monitoring. However, as NILM scales from the lab to real-world applications, it faces not only methodological difficulties from diverse electricity consumption characteristics under complex disturbances, but also operational difficulties in managing numerous devices and decentralized data across cloud and edge with limited computing resources. Given the critical need to enhance NILM's practicality for widespread adoption, research interest in this field has surged significantly over the past six years. Therefore, we analyze the above difficulties following a brief review of NILM's fundamentals. Then, we highlight the advances across four key aspects of NILM's practicality: robustness, adaptability, collaboration, and deployability. In addition, we discuss the limitations that hinder real-world NILM applications, aiming to inspire further research. Finally, we provide an outlook on the developments in data ecosystem, implementation guidance, application scenarios, and related services

Keywords: Non-intrusive load monitoring; Robustness; Adaptability; Collaboration; Deployability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261925011924
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:appene:v:398:y:2025:i:c:s0306261925011924

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 405891/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2025.126462

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan

More articles in Applied Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().