ThinkHome: A smart home as digital ecosystem

Smart homes have become increasingly popular in the past few years. Similarly, new buildings are nowadays planned and built following sustainability guidelines. Energy efficient residential homes have gained importance for two reasons. They contribute to the protection of our environment and they simultaneously reduce operational costs over the whole building lifecycle. However, the full potential of smart homes still lies fallow due to the high complexity of the underlying automation systems as well as the physical processes that are to be controlled. This is the motivation to review smart homes under a digital ecosystem perspective. With respect to this viewpoint, this paper proposes a system concept that applies artificial intelligence in smart homes. Main goals are to minimize energy consumption while at the same time guaranteeing user comfort. Therefore, intelligent control strategies are developed that take a multitude of parameters into consideration and operate automatically. For this purpose, an agent part populated by a society of autonomous agents that implement artificial intelligence is developed. It is supported by an ontology based knowledge representation that contains all relevant data in a structured way.