PowerOnt: An Ontology-Based Approach for Power Consumption Estimation in Smart Homes

Porto, the institutional repository of the Politecnico di Torino, is provided by the University Library and the IT-Services. The aim is to enable open access to all the world. Please share with us how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Summary. The impact of electricity consumption in buildings on the overall energy budget of European and North-American states is steadily growing and requires solutions for achieving a more sustainable development. Smart metering and energy management system can be hardly afforded by residential homes, for their cost and the required granular-ity. Empowering smart homes with suitable power consumption models allows to estimate, in real-time, the current home consumption on the basis of currently active devices. In this paper we introduce an ontology based power consumption model (PowerOnt) for smart homes, and we discuss some application use cases where the proposed approach may successfully be exploited. Results show that the modeling approach has the potential to support energy efficiency measures into residential homes with few or no metering devices.