Rule-based Approaches for Energy Savings in an Ambient Intelligence Environment

T. Stavropoulos, E. Kontopoulos, N. Bassiliades, J. Argyriou, A. Bikakis, D. Vrakas, I. Vlahavas, “Rule-based Approaches for Energy Savings in an Ambient Intelligence Environment”, Journal of Pervasive and Mobile Computing, Elsevier, Vol. 19, pp. 1-23, 2015.

T. Stavropoulos, E. Kontopoulos, Nick Bassiliades, J. Argyriou, A. Bikakis, Dimitris Vrakas, I. Vlahavas

defeasible logic, smart building, energy savings, ambient intelligence, semantic web services.

This paper presents a novel real-world application for energy savings in a Smart Building environment. The proposed system unifies heterogeneous wireless sensor networks under a Semantic Web Service middleware. Two complementary and mutually exclusive rule-based approaches for enforcing energy-saving policies are proposed: a reactive agent based on production rules and a deliberative agent based on defeasible logic. The system was deployed at a Greek University, showing promising experimental results (at least 4% daily savings). Although the percentage of energy savings may seem low, the greatest merit of the method is ensuring no energy is wasted by constantly enforcing the policies.