Context-aware resource management in multi-inhabitant smart homes: A framework based on Nash [formula omitted]-learning

Abstract

A smart home aims at building intelligent automation with a goal to provide its inhabitants with maximum possible comfort, minimum resource consumption and thus reduced cost of home maintenance. ‘Context Awareness’ is perhaps the most salient feature of such an intelligent environment. An inhabitant’s mobility and activities play a significant role in defining his/her contexts in and around the home. Although there exists an optimal algorithm for location and activity tracking of a single inhabitant, the correlation and dependence between multiple inhabitants’ contexts within the same environment make the location and activity tracking more challenging. In this paper, we first prove that the optimal location prediction across multiple inhabitants in smart homes is an NP-hard problem. Next, to capture the correlation and interactions between different inhabitants’ movements (and hence activities), we develop a novel framework based on a game theoretic, Nash H -learning approach that attempts to minimize the joint location uncertainty of inhabitants. Our framework achieves a Nash equilibrium such that no inhabitant is given preference over others. This results in more accurate prediction of contexts and more adaptive control of automated devices, thus leading to a mobility-aware resource (say, energy) management scheme in multi-inhabitant smart homes. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework is capable of adaptively controlling a smart environment, significantly reduces energy consumption and enhances the comfort of the inhabitants.