Abstract
Many efforts today aim to energy saving, promoting the user’s awareness and virtuous behavior in a sustainability perspective. Our houses, appliances, energy meters and devices are becoming smarter and connected, domotics is increasing possibilities in house automation and control, and ambient intelligence and assisted living are bringing attention onto people’s needs from different viewpoints.Our assumption is that considering these aspects together allows for novel intriguing possibilities. To this end, in this paper we combine home energy management with domotics, coordination technologies, intelligent agents, ambient intelligence, ubiquitous technologies and gamification to devise novel scenarios, where energy monitoring and management is just the basic brick of a much wider and comprehensive home management system. The aim is to control home appliances well beyond energy consumption, combining home comfort, appliance scheduling, safety constraints, etc. with dynamically-changeable users’ preferences, goals and priorities. At the same time, usability and attractiveness are seen as key success factors: so, the intriguing technologies available in most houses and smart devices are exploited to make the system configuration and use simpler, entertaining and attractive for users. These aspects are also integrated with ubiquitous and pervasive technologies, geo-localization, social networks and communities to provide enhanced functionalities and support smarter application scenarios, hereby further strengthening technology acceptation and diffusion.Accordingly, we first analyse the system requirements and define a reference multi-layer architectural model – the Butlers architecture – that specifies seven layers of functionalities, correlating the requirements, the corresponding technologies and the consequent value-added for users in each layer. Then, we outline a set of notable scenarios of increasing functionalities and complexity, discuss the structure of the corresponding system patterns in terms of the proposed architecture, and make this concrete by presenting some comprehensive interaction examples as comic strip stories. Next, we discuss the implementation requirements and how they can be met with the available technologies, discuss a possible architecture, refine it in the concrete case of the TuCSoN coordination technology, present a subsystem prototype and discuss its properties in the Butlers perspective.
Highlights
In most of today’s systems and applications, energy management basically means energy saving: the aim is to measure how much energy is consumed, either by a single appliance or the whole house, to make the user aware and promote virtuous behaviours
We commit to a specific coordination technology and infrastructure (TuCSoN) as the technology of choice to concretise our Butlers logical architecture: we summarise its basics and discuss how its main metaphors – tuple centres – can be exploited to effectively provide the kind of flexible and extensible support needed by our architecture
For the sake of concreteness, we report below the specification of an ACC contract – one of the many around – namely, the one belonging to the Role Activation Agent which checks the preconditions for role activation
Summary
In most of today’s systems and applications, energy management basically means energy saving: the aim is to measure how much energy is consumed, either by a single appliance or the whole house, to make the user aware and promote virtuous behaviours. Other systems support user-defined policies, which take into account the rate plan, the user habits, and sometimes priorities among home appliances to perform appliance control: in (Futursoft 2012), for instance, the real-time monitoring of appliances’ consumption is used to control their switch-on/switch-off times, disabling pre-determined appliances to run the most energydemanding tasks at the cheaper times. Still, despite their effectiveness, these systems usually embed little or none intelligence – they just react to selected situations by applying pre-determined rules. Like (EyeOn 2012), go a little further, coupling load control to preestablished priorities to switch appliances on/off based on user-defined rules: yet, any change requires a system reconfiguration, since priorities cannot be changed dynamically
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