Fed-NILM: A federated learning-based non-intrusive load monitoring method for privacy-protection

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) is essential for understanding consumer power consumption patterns and may have wide applications such as in carbon emission reduction and energy conservation. Determining NILM models requires massive load data containing different types of appliances. However, inadequate load data and the risk of power consumer privacy breaches may be encountered by local data owners when determining the NILM model. To address these problems, a novel NILM method based on federated learning (FL) called Fed-NILM is proposed. In Fed-NILM, instead of local load data, local model parameters are shared among multiple data owners. The global NILM model is obtained by averaging the parameters with the appropriate weights. Experiments based on two measured load datasets are performed to explore the generalization capability of Fed-NILM. In addition, a comparison of Fed-NILM with locally trained NILM models and the centrally trained NILM model is conducted. Experimental results show that the Fed-NILM exhibits superior performance in terms of scalability and convergence. Fed-NILM out performs locally trained NILM models operated by local data owners and approaches the centrally trained NILM model, which is trained on the entire load dataset without privacy protection. The proposed Fed-NILM significantly improves the co-modelling capabilities of local data owners while protecting the privacy of power consumers.