Innovative Techniques to maximize Energy savings in a Domestic Environment

摘要

The maximization of Energy savings in a Domestic Environment has been addressed in this paper having in mind the personal preferences of the users living in the house. The aim of present study is the optimization of a scarce resource with constraints set by an external actor, the homeowner. The Domestic Environment we considered in the present work basically consists of a certain number of appliances, as above mentioned, which exchange useful information through several kinds of communication networks (see [2] and [4]). We consider mainly a Home Automation System like studied and developed by Wrap (see [8] and [4]). The different devices of the domestic system and the external human user require a specific and probably variable amount of energy during their normal working cycle; each appliance also needs to cooperate with the other ones in order to achieve the maximum efficiency of the energy resource. In any case, this Domestic Environment can roughly be viewed as a partially distributed control system, whose components are essentially autonomous, posses a certain degree of intelligence and share some common goals. This description fits well with the MAS paradigm like introduced in the study of home automation systems by Lab MACS laboratory of UNIVPM (see [1], [3] and [4]). The use of a formalism derived from the MAS theory, in principle, respond to the optimization needs, providing a suitable conceptual framework and appropriate methodological tools.