An Anticipation Mechanism for Power Management in a Smart Home using Multi-Agent Systems

This paper presents the principles of a home automation system dedicated to power management that adapts power consumption to available power ressources according to inhabitant comfort and cost criteria. The system relies on a multi-agent paradigm. Each agent supports a service achieved by several devices, it cooperates and coordinates its action with others in order to find an acceptable near-optimal solution. The control algorithm is decomposed into two complementary mechanisms: a reactive mechanism, which protects from constraint violations, and an anticipation mechanism, which computes a plan for global consumption according to predicted productions and consumptions and to inhabitant criteria. The paper shows how to compute a global consumption plan relying on Tabu Search´s algorithm and how to reduce the problem complexity by dividing the whole problem into independent sub-problems.