Towards a semantically-enabled holistic vision for energy optimisation in smart home environments

Nowadays energy-saving represents a mandatory requirement for building. Several efforts have been done both to reduce energy consumption and to promote alternative generation sources. By the way, in most of the existing systems these two faces of energy-conservation are managed in isolation. In this paper, we propose a novel holistic vision for a smart home environment, in which energy administration embraces both energy production and consumption and it´s handled in conjunction with services management. The proposed system uses an IP-based network as main communication channel and a semantic extension of the UPnP protocol for devices auto-configuration and control. An ontology framework is used to encode all the relevant information about devices, services and context, including energy status and user preferences, into a global knowledge base. Using the inference capabilities provided by the used rich semantic descriptions, such gKB can be used to support efficient control logics and intelligent decision making, that can be exploited also for a more effective energy management.