Using AI to realize energy efficient yet comfortable smart homes

Motivations for the use of automation technologies in the residential domain are manifold. Besides efficiency considerations for energy intensive areas such as heating and air-conditioning, increased comfort, smart home care, and ambient assisted living are key motives. A key challenge of future smart homes is to find a good balance between these goals and not to treat them in an isolated fashion. The ThinkHome project aims at optimizing energy efficiency and user comfort at the same time, yet always acknowledging the residents´ desires. It is designed in a way to relieve the smart home inhabitants from cumbersome tasks such as re-adjustments of their preferences by introducing learning capabilities and context awareness in addition with advanced control strategies based on artificial intelligence. After a short introduction into ThinkHome´s requirements and benefits, a control strategy for the optimum start/stop operation of a heating system is presented where the autonomous adaptation of temperature setback schedules for independent rooms is evaluated by means of a building simulation framework.