IoT Gateway for Personalized User Comfort Management in Smart Home Applications

Smart Home applications tend to be more focused not only on responding to user's actions but also on anticipating his needs and adding controls to support these needs. Researchers have developed so far methods which consider behavior modeling for easier identification of deviating situations or automating user actions, comfort and energy saving models which aim to optimize consumption while keeping the habitant perception of the environmental state at a proper level, or context awareness integrated with the building automatic control systems to adapt environmental control rules to the house special characteristics. This paper proposes a user comfort management architecture which processes inputs from context analysis and behavior modelling modules to achieve a narrow control scheme fitted to user's perception of comfort and able to adapt to different action scenarios. Such a system considers the acquisition of temperature, humidity, and CO2 data, as well as inputs from presence sensors and integrates air conditioning equipment for set-point change or room thermostat control. Electrical consumers patterns can also be identified in relationship with user behavior to support energy efficiency algorithms. The paper discusses the requirements the models should feature, the functional aspects and proposes an algorithm for their integration.