Two level hierarchical control strategy applied to an intelligent house

Houses are becoming intelligent in our days. It is expected that in the near future the instrumentation and automation solutions that have been entering in our cars, in the last decade, are going to expand into the house market. The future intelligent house is a system that interacts with its inhabitants showing information about the system state, alarm occurrences and making suggestions to overcome emerging problems. In this paper a two-level hierarchical control strategy is applied to an intelligent house. The developed control architecture is based on an industrial PLC network that is managed by a SCADA supervisor system. The first control loop is managed locally by each PLC, controlling its own process. The second control loop integrates the local information from each slave-PLC and manages the system globally, through the developed SCADA supervisor control algorithm. Tests on a prototype are presented in this paper and the experiments show the capability of this two-level hierarchical control strategy to monitor and control intelligent houses, preventing accidents and improving home comfort.