Using Consumer Behavior Data to Reduce Energy Consumption in Smart Homes: Applying Machine Learning to Save Energy without Lowering Comfort of Inhabitants

Abstract

This paper discusses how usage patterns and preferences of inhabitants can be learned efficiently to allow smart homes to autonomously achieve energy savings. We propose a frequent sequential pattern mining algorithm suitable for real-life smart home event data. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared to existing algorithms regarding completeness/correctness of the results, run times as well as memory consumption and elaborates on the shortcomings of the different solutions.We also propose a recommender system based on the developed algorithm. This recommender provides recommendations to the users to reduce their energy consumption. The recommender system was deployed to a set of test homes. The test participants rated the impact of the recommendations on their comfort. We used this feedback to adjust the system parameters and make it more accurate during a second test phase. The historical dataset provided by digitalSTROM contained 33 homes with 3521 devices and over 4 million events. The system produced 160 recommendations on the first phase and 120 on the second phase. The ratio of useful recommendations was close to 10%.

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“…The work presented by [17,18] mine sequential patterns to understand appliance usage patterns to save energy. An incremental sequential mining technique to discover correlation patterns among appliances is presented in [1].…”

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“…Among the candidate sensors to be paired with occupancy detection sensors are environmental sensors, which obtain occupancy information through changes in environmental readings in a local proximity. Environmental assessment WSNs, such as those for indoor air quality applications [10, 11] and smart climate control systems [7, 8, 12, 13], make use of sensors that can observe volatile organic compounds, temperature, and humidity. By not focusing on specific users, the environmental methods satisfy anonymity and the indirect nature avoids requiring user attention and interaction.…”