  Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) is an important application to monitor
household appliance activities and provide related information to house owner
or/and utility company via a single sensor installed at the electrical entry of
the house. It can be used for different purposes in residential and industrial
sectors. Thus, an increasing number of new algorithms have been developed in
recent years. In these algorithms, researchers either use existing public
datasets or collect their own data which causes such problems as insufficiency
of electrical parameters, missing of ground-truth data, absence of many
appliances, and lack of appliance information. To solve these problems, this
paper presents a model-based platform for NILM system development, namely
Functional Intrusive Load Monitor (FILM). By using this platform, the state
transitions and activities of all the involved appliances can be preset by
researchers, and multiple electrical parameters such as harmonics and power
factor can be monitored or calculated. This platform will help researchers save
the time of collecting experimental data, utilize precise control of individual
appliance activities, and develop load signatures of devices. This paper
describes the steps, structure, and requirements of building this platform.
Case study is presented to help understand this platform.
