Automation of Smart Homes with Multiple Rule Sources
Kaufman Eran Yigal Hoffner
Using rules for home automation presents several challenges, especially when
considering multiple stakeholders in addition to residents, such as homeowners,
local authorities, energy suppliers, and system providers, who will wish to
contribute rules to safeguard their interests. Managing rules from various
sources requires a structured procedure, a relevant policy, and a designated
authority to ensure authorized and correct contributions and address potential
conflicts. In addition, the smart home rule language needs to express
conditions and decisions at a high level of abstraction without specifying
implementation details such as interfaces, access protocols, and room layout.
Decoupling high-level decisions from these details supports the transferability
and adaptability of rules to similar homes. This separation also has important
implications for structuring the smart home system and the security
architecture. Our proposed approach and system implementation introduce a rule
management process, a rule administrator, and a domain-specific rule language
to address these challenges. In addition, the system provides a learning
process that observes residents, detects behavior patterns, and derives rules
which are then presented as recommendations to the system.