Abstract. Home automation has recently gained a new momentum thanks to the ever-increasing commercial availability of domotic components. In this context, researchers are working to provide interoperation mechanisms and to add intelligence on top of them. For supporting intelligent behaviors, house modeling is an essential requirement to understand current and future house states and to possibly drive more complex actions. In this paper we propose a new house modeling ontology designed to fit real world domotic system capabilities and to support interoperation between currently available and future solutions. Taking advantage of technologies developed in the context of the Semantic Web, the DogOnt ontology supports device/network independent description of houses, including both "controllable" and architectural elements. States and functionalities are automatically associated to the modeled elements through proper inheritance mechanisms and by means of properly defined SWRL auto-completion rules which ease the modeling process, while automatic device recognition is achieved through classification reasoning.
Domotics as a branch of automation has achieved remarkable advances in recent years, due to the enormous development of telecommunications that has allowed improving and complementing services of this type of solutions. It is necessary in the electronic engineering programs of the universities, to develop methods and strategies that facilitate the teaching of these subjects in a practical way, so that the student learns by doing. This article describes the development of a didactic dashboard for the teaching of domotics; integrated by sensors, actuators and a computer control interface to facilitate the execution of laboratory practices aimed at solving problems of comfort, safety and energy management at home in an interactive way. In order to verify the usefulness of the domotic dashboard in the teaching-learning process, a survey was applied to a group of teachers and students in Universidad de la Costa in Barranquilla, Colombia, showing that the board can become a useful resource for domotics learning.
Buildings account for a relevant fraction of the energy consumed by a country, up to 20-40% of the yearly energy consumption. If only electricity is considered, the fraction is even bigger, reaching around 73% of the total electricity consumption, equally divided into residential and commercial dwellings. Building and Home Automation have a potential to profoundly impact current and future buildings' energy efficiency by informing users about their current consumption patterns, by suggesting more efficient behaviors, and by pro-actively changing/modifying user actions for reducing the associated energy wastes. In this paper we investigate the capability of an automated home to automatically, and timely, inform users about energy consumption, by harvesting opinions of residential inhabitants on energy feedback interfaces. We report here the results of an on-line survey, involving nearly a thousand participants, about feedback mechanisms suggested by the research community, with the goal of understanding what feedback is felt by home inhabitants easier to understand, more likely to be used, and more effective in promoting behavior changes. Contextually, we also collect and distill users' attitude towards in-home energy displays and their preferred locations, gathering useful insights on user-driven design of more effective in-home energy displays.
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