Methodology to improve devices interoperability for energy efficiency in smart homes

The advances in home automation and communication technologies offer several attractive benefits for the modern smart home, such as increased energy efficiency, improved residential comfort and reduced operative costs for the homeowner. As the residential sector is responsible for about 20% of the total energy consumption, a strong interest to the smart home capabilities is growing all over the world. On the other hand, the increasing embedded intelligence of smart devices is also generating a huge quantity of data, which needs to be properly managed and coordinated. This paper defines a methodology to improve smart home information management and proposes a smart home data model able to exploit devices’ information and provide energy-control services. It allows aggregating significant data and defining a set of rules to manage the correlation between devices, desired functions and smart home events. The proposed approach is validated by the implementation on a real smart home environment, where several devices intelligently interoperate to provide energy-control services involving a cluster of companies and utilities.