Energy-efficient smart home systems: Infrastructure and decision-making process

Abstract

One of the main global challenges in the last few years has been to improve energy efficiency. In this area, the residential sector is responsible for a considerable proportion of energy consumption and a possible way to address this problem is to adopt a HAS (Home Automation System). This work reports the results of our investigation in smart home systems that combine WSANs (Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks) and Computational Intelligence techniques with a focus on energy efficiency. We discuss several valuable ideas from this systematic review, including guidelines for new research projects in the area of home automation. As result of this survey, the main contributions of this work are: (i) identification and discussion of studies that combine WSANs and computation intelligence in HAS that particularly target energy-saving; (ii) finding gaps in the selected works, and offering solutions that can guide new areas of research, as well as new projects in HAS and (iii) demonstrating that solutions based on WSANs that are integrated with computational intelligence have emerged as an attractive alternative that can be deployed in a HAS.