Electric Load Classification by Binary Voltage–Current Trajectory Mapping

Characterization of electric loads provides opportunities to incorporate detailed energy usage information into applications such as protection, efficiency certification, demand response, and energy management. This paper proposes a low computational cost, but yet accurate method, to extract signatures for load classification and characterization. Instead of utilizing digital signal processing and frequency-domain analysis, this paper abstracts the similarity of voltage-current (V-I) trajectories between loads and proposes to map V-I trajectories to a grid of cells with binary values. Graphical signatures can then be extracted for many applications. The proposed method significantly reduces the computational cost compared with existing frequency-domain signature extraction methods. Test results show that an average of over 99% of success rate can be achieved using the proposed signatures.