Development of a LabVIEW-Based Data Acquisition and Monitoring System for Demand Response Laboratory

Active involvement of residential consumers in smart home initiatives is a key for realization of the smart grid. In this framework, the active customers are subject to demand response programs used to efficiently reduce the amount and timing of electricity consumption. The main requirements for residential demand response programs are acquiring real-time electricity consumption data and load profiles of residential appliances. Development of communication technologies and smart load monitoring applications has simplified the access to this information. This paper investigates and describes the design of a developed data acquisition and monitoring system for demand response implementation in the residential sector. Our smart monitoring system integrates a number of residential electric appliances to study their daily energy consumption profiles and, in the future, forecasts their potential demand response capacity. We describe the design of a LabView application for acquiring, logging, processing and visualizing data derived from the Demand Response Laboratory (DR Lab) at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (UNIZG-FER). The monitoring system is implemented in a way that enables an-cillary service provisioning and participation in demand response programs.