Mario J. Kofler

ThinkHome: A smart home as digital ecosystem

Smart homes have become increasingly popular in the past few years. Similarly, new buildings are nowadays planned and built following sustainability guidelines. Energy efficient residential homes have gained importance for two reasons. They contribute to the protection of our environment and they simultaneously reduce operational costs over the whole building lifecycle. However, the full potential of smart homes still lies fallow due to the high complexity of the underlying automation systems as well as the physical processes that are to be controlled. This is the motivation to review smart homes under a digital ecosystem perspective. With respect to this viewpoint, this paper proposes a system concept that applies artificial intelligence in smart homes. Main goals are to minimize energy consumption while at the same time guaranteeing user comfort. Therefore, intelligent control strategies are developed that take a multitude of parameters into consideration and operate automatically. For this purpose, an agent part populated by a society of autonomous agents that implement artificial intelligence is developed. It is supported by an ontology based knowledge representation that contains all relevant data in a structured way.

Building automation systems integration into the Internet of Things the IoT6 approach, its realization and validation

Building automation is concerned with monitoring and control of building services equipment. Over the last years, many different control network protocols have materialized for this task. Ideally, an all-in-one solution would be desired which allows total control of all conceivable scenarios. Even despite the long timespan of development, no single specific protocol has yet emerged that covers all application domains. Rather, many different protocols co-exist that rarely interact. For purposes of management-level system integration, a common, preferably open format for access to data points which is aligned with IT standards is a key asset. Following the current trends in information technology, Web Services for machine-to-machine interaction over a network seem to be a reasonable choice here. Based on them, an integration into the future Internet of Things (IoT) can be achieved. The IoT thereby promises to provide a dynamic global network infrastructure with self configuring capabilities resting upon interoperable communication protocols. This paper will focus on challenges and approaches allowing a cross-domain interaction of building automation systems while at the same time discussing their seamless integration into the IoT.

A knowledge base for energy-efficient smart homes

With the rise of energy costs for heating, cooling and ventilation and an increasing amount of energy consuming appliances (e.g. white goods, consumer electronic devices), hidden saving potentials can be found in numerous areas of a modern smart home. To manually enforce an energy-saving policy is a tedious procedure which needs the user to be aware of all kinds of equipment as well as building information. Especially the thermal properties of a building are generally unknown to the occupant of a residential home. Information already collected in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry is often not considered and neglected as soon as the project is finished. Reusing this knowledge to optimize energy consumption seems natural, as nowadays the information is often already available in a structured form as building information model (BIM). The more knowledge is available about building properties of the smart home, the better the system can act as an autonomous caretaker in order to create an environmental-friendly and comfortable ambience. Therefore, the transition of information from a building information model into a more intelligent knowledge base as foundation of an autonomous automation system is desirable.