Agenda Driven Home Automation - Towards High Level Context Aware Systems

In this paper, we present a system that exploits the semantics of events that are traditionally stored in simple agendas to control appliances and other ordinary devices in the home. Our approach is based on representing the content of agendas using an expressive and semantic modeling language and on implementing the system on top of the Amigo context management service. This approach makes it possible to automate the control of physical devices while taking into account the anticipation of future events, where control includes action triggering and self configuration. We have assessed our approach through the development and deployment of an agenda based home automation system that controls a variety of devices including heating systems, lights, and motorized window shutters.