Home Automation - A Step Towards Better Energy Management.

Abstract

This paper argues that home automation can make a difference regarding better energy management and usage of renewable energy sources. People are sensible to the need of using energy and other resources more rationally but do very little to that end on their daily lives at home. However, home automation can come to their rescue and we give examples of the functions and the benefits that can be achieved.

The home automation market is very fragmented and many different technologies exist, which are incompatible. To overcome this problem, in this paper we advocate that interoperation should be achieved at a high level and we describe an abstraction layer that allows access to different home automation devices in an uniform and generic way, independently of their technology.

Next we address aspects of system supervision, which are essential to provide the required functions and offer an adequate control and management of the available resources. We propose an approach based on software agents, whose behavior is defined by rules. This offers an expressive means to state the users requirements and preferences.