To Do and Not to Do: Constrained Scenarios for Safe Smart House

A smart house is a complex system, and configuring it to act as desired is difficult and error prone. In this paper we extend a previously developed framework based on timed automata for designing safe and reliable home automation scenarios to make it easier to use. To do so we abstract it with an Event-Condition-Action language to create intelligent scenarios, and constraints that prevent scenarios with undesirable behaviours to be applied. This language is itself abstracted by a graphical user interface that enables the creation of scenarios by manipulating graphical blocks representing elements of the language. We have designed and implemented a prototype system to test our approach, and we report on a qualitative user study that was conducted.