Planning for Coordination of Devices in Energy-Smart Environments

As a sustainability property, energy efficiency is of an extreme importance, especially in environments that are heavy energy consumers, such as homes and buildings. Nowadays, homes and buildings are equipped with many devices that could be exploited in order to make them smart and energy-efficient. Our vision is to bring convergence of smart environments, energy efficiency and automated planning by proposing a planning framework for energy-efficient coordination of devices in smart environments. We establish a proof of concept confirming that automated monitoring and control of devices can lead to significant savings not only on energy, but also on the amount paid for that energy. We envision use of Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning due to several reasons identified in our profound overview of the most popular HTN planners. We strive to answer several research questions relating to the general design of the planning framework, the use and improvement of HTN planning, the support for users to interact with the planning framework, and the evaluation of the framework in a living-lab set up at the University