Fuzzy ambient intelligence for intelligent office environments

In this paper we present an ambient intelligence system for modelling and control of power use within an office environment. We define a multi-scale model of the office worker, consisting of a coarse grained office user profile, together with a fine grained characteristics model to summarise their behaviours. Sensor data gathered from individual offices are used to create these models. Collected data are fuzzified to produce meaningful and understandable descriptions of the worker's daily activities. These models of the individuals form the basis of a Dynamic Power Usage Scheme (DPUS) to control individual offices. A trial version of the system has been implemented using individual academic staff offices in a university campus. Experiments have shown that even a simplistic user profile can lead to significant power savings from appropriate control of computers in an office environment.