A Multi Interface Home Automation System with Distributed Intelligence

During the last decade, plenty of devices labeled as “smart” have appeared in the market with the promise of taking the relationship home-user to a new level. Unfortunately, most of these devices are not able to interact with one another and the “smart” solution reduces to the use of a phone app to control a particular device or process. Lately, new devices known as smart hubs have arisen as smart home enablers based on their ability to talk several communication protocols and incorporate devices from different vendors. However, hub-based solutions suffer from various drawbacks, notably the lack of scalability and the presence of a single point of failure. In this work, a multi agent approach is proposed to generate and operate home automation systems. The proposed approach distributes the intelligence among agents, which behave as finite state machines, achieving a scalable and robust architecture. A pilot implementation is presented as proof of concept.