Modeling, Simulation, and Control of Smart Homes Using Petri Nets

Smart home is a relatively new technology. Originally, smart home technology was used to control environmental systems such as lighting and heating; but recently the use of smart technology has been developed so that almost any electrical component within the home can be included in the system. Complex smart home applications include three levels of control: local control, discrete-event control, and supervisory control. The local control, at the lower level, handles the operating conditions of the continuous time physical variables (e.g. temperature, light, level, etc.). The discrete-event control is meant by the asynchronous events and accordingly issues the corresponding discrete actions, based on the evolution specification. The supervisory control, at the upper level, takes care of the resources allocation, activities coordination, and deadlock avoidance. This paper proposes a technique that employs the Petri net tools to model, simulate, analyze, and control at the discrete-event level the smart home applications. Petri nets are proved to be suitable formal models that can be used to verify the operation of smart homes at the simulation level. Besides, it is very easy to get an executable version of the model for real-time implementation.