A3ID: An Automatic and Interpretable Implicit Interference Detection Method for Smart Home via Knowledge Graph

The smart home brings together devices, the cloud, data, and people to make home living more comfortable and safer. Trigger-action programming enables users to connect smart devices using if-this-then-that (IFTTT)-style rules. With the increasing number of devices in smart home systems, multiple running rules that act on actuators in contradictory ways may cause unexpected and unpredictable interference problems, which can put residents and their belongings at risk. Previous studies have considered explicit interference problems related to multiple rules targeting a single actuator, whereas implicit interference (interference across different actuators) detection is still challenging and not yet well studied owing to the effort-intensive and time-consuming annotation work of obtaining device information. The lack of knowledge about devices is a critical reason that affects the accuracy and efficiency in implicit interference detection. In this article, we propose A3ID, an automatic detection method for implicit interference based on knowledge graphs. Using natural language processing (NLP) techniques and a lexical database, A3ID can extract knowledge of devices from a knowledge graph, including functionality, effect, and scope. Then, it analyzes and detects interferences among the different devices semantically in three steps, without human intervention. Furthermore, it provides user-friendly explanations in a well-designed structure to specify possible reasons for the implicit interference problems. Our experiment on 11 859 IFTTT-style rules shows that A3ID outperforms state-of-the-art methods by more than 33% in the F1-score for the detection of implicit interference. Moreover, evaluations on an extended data set for devices from ConceptNet (a knowledge graph) and five smart home systems suggest that A3ID also has favorable performance with other devices not limited to the smart home domain.