Conflicting rules and rules with exceptions are very common in natural language specification employed to describe the behaviour of devices operating in a real-world context. This is common exactly because those specifications are processed by humans, and humans apply common sense and strategic reasoning about those rules to resolve the conflicts. In this paper, we deal with the challenge of providing, step by step, a model of energy saving rule specification and processing methods that are used to reduce the consumptions of a system of devices, by preventing energy waste. We argue that a very promising non-monotonic approach to such a problem can lie upon Defeasible Logic, following therefore an approach that has shown success in the current literature about usage of this logic for conflict rule resolution and for human–computer interaction in complex systems. Starting with rules specified at an abstract level, but compatibly with the natural aspects of such a specification (including temporal and power absorption constraints), we provide a formalism that generates the extension of a basic Defeasible Logic, which corresponds to turned on or off devices.
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