Semantic-based resource discovery and orchestration in Home and Building Automation: a multi-agent approach

Home and building automation (HBA) trends toward the Ambient Intelligence paradigm, which aims to autonomously coordinate and control appliances and subsystems in a given environment. Nevertheless, HBA is based on an explicit user-home interaction and basically enables static and predetermined scenarios. This paper proposes a more flexible multi-agent approach, leveraging semantic-based resource discovery and orchestration for HBA applications. Backward-compatible enhancements to EIB/KNX domotic standard allow to support the semantic characterization of user profiles and device functionalities, thus enabling: 1) negotiation of the most suitable home services/functionalities according to implicit and explicit user needs and 2) device-driven interaction for adapting the environment to context evolution. A power-management problem in HBA is presented as a case study to better clarify the proposal and assess its effectiveness.