Rule-based approaches for energy savings in an ambient intelligence environment

摘要

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 that no energy is wasted by constantly enforcing the policies. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.