Toolchain for user-centered intelligent floor heating control

Floor heating systems are important components of nowadays home-automation setups. The control of a floor heating system is a nontrivial task and the present solutions essentially implement variants of a simple bang-bang controller that opens for a hot water circulation in a room if its current temperature is below the user defined target temperature, otherwise it closes for the heating in the room. The disadvantage is that the heat exchange among the rooms, outside weather conditions, weather forecast and other factors are not considered. We propose a novel model-driven approach for intelligent floor heating control based on a chain of tools that allow us to gather the sensor readings from the actual hardware and use the state-of-the-art controller synthesis tool UPPAAL Stratego in order to synthesise abstract control strategies that are then executed on the real hardware platform provided by the company Seluxit. We have built a scaled demonstrator of the system and the experimental results document a 38% to 52 % increase in user satisfaction, moreover with additional energy savings between 2% to 12%.