Disaggregation of HVAC load profiles for the monitoring of individual equipment

This paper presents a load disaggregation method for the monitoring and supervision of the load profiles of individual equipment in an HVAC installation. The method takes advantage of the wealth of sensor and actuation information found in Building Energy Management Systems in order to find correlations between the state of operation of each machine and the power demand of the installation. This enables to model the individual power of the equipment on account of their state, and in combination with other support variables that influence their load demand, such as weather conditions. The resulting array of equipment models can be evaluated in real-time to infer the expected power consumption of each machine. Then, allowing the tracking of their individual power consumption while at the same time significantly lowering the cost of the acquisition and monitoring infrastructure, because a single power meter can be used to accurately monitor several machines when following this approach. The presented method has been validated by means of experimental data from a pilot plant where the complete system has been implemented.