ComfOnt: A Semantic Framework for Indoor Comfort and Energy Saving In Smart Homes

Abstract

This work introduces ComfOnt, a semantic framework developed within the context of ambient assisted living, context awareness, and ambient intelligence Italian research projects. ComfOnt leverages knowledge regarding Smart Home inhabitants and their particular needs, the devices deployed inside the domestic environment (appliances, sensors, and actuators), the amount of their energy consumption, and indoor comfort metrics to provide dwellers with customized services. Developed reusing widely adopted ontologies, ComfOnt aims at providing inhabitants with the possibility of having personalized indoor comfort in their living environments and at helping them in scheduling their daily activities requiring appliances; in fact, the proposed semantic framework enables the representation of appliances' energy consumption and the energy profile of the Smart Home, thus assisting the dwellers in avoiding power cuts and fostering energy savings. ComfOnt serves as a knowledge base for a prototypical application (DECAM) dedicated to Smart Home inhabitants; the architecture and the functionalities of DECAM are here presented.Although research in the fields of SH, ambient assisted living (AAL), ambient intelligence (AmI), context awareness (CA), and IoT leveraging semantic formalization of knowledge has acquired a growing importance in the last years, only a few works dedicated to the SH tackled the issue of modeling indoor comfort metrics. This work aims at contributing to the field of domain ontologies dedicated to the representation of knowledge necessary to customize services within an SH, including comfort metrics leveraging on already existing models. The proposed set of domain ontologies arises from the experiences of three Italian research projects funded by the Lombardy Region: i-Zeb, Future Homes for Future Communities (FHfFC), and CasAware. i-Zeb [4] is a project aimed at researching and investigating the use of innovative building materials and technological solutions to foster the implementation of Nearly Zero-Energy Buildings. FHfFC [5] focuses on deploying a semantic architecture to enable a set of assistive services aimed at improving inhabitants' daily lives; the services are addressed to an ageing population and encompass a wide range of fields, such as indoor comfort, device interoperability, and domestic rehabilitation. CasAware [6,7] leverages ontological representation of domestic appliances and their energy consumption to foster energy saving behavior, help the dwellers to better schedule their operations with appliances, and avoid domestic power cuts.The set of domain ontologies developed within these three projects-named ComfOnt-allows the formalization of some fundamental indoor comfort metrics, including Italian regulations and laws, and knowledge regarding sensors, actuators, and measurements; ComfOnt can be adopted to describe environmental conditions within the SH and to trigger comfort actuation after detecting an unsafe or uncomfortable situation, exploiting the results deriving from reasoning proc...

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