SCORE Project: SE4YH
Title: Smart Energy for Your Home
Sponsor: Matteo Rossi
Standards are emerging for connecting smart home appliances in a network that allows users to monitor and control them through hw/sw gateways. One such standard is developed by the Energy@Home association (http://www.energy-home.it/), with particular focus on energy management.
The goal of the project is to develop a system that allows users to define their own preferences and rules for the management of energy consumed by their appliances (e.g., conflicts, priorities, goals), and to manage the appliances in the house depending on them. The students are expected to survey potential users to understand and define the kind of management rules that are of interest for users, and to define a flexible infrastructure to allow them to express and run these rules in their home.
Project Description
More and more home appliances are becoming smart devices, which can be monitored and controlled remotely. For example, they can receive commands for the scheduling of their working cycles, or to safely interrupt them (for example, a washing machine allows its washing cycle to be interrupted for a limited time after certain phases without compromising the quality of the washing and without damaging the clothes); these commands can be used to avoid system overloading, which can in turn lead to blackouts, or to increased costs when certain thresholds are crossed.
Associations such as Energy@Home are developing standards for interacting with smart appliances and applications for monitoring and managing them.
The goals of the project are the following:
- To design mechanisms through which users can define their own preferences and rules for the management of their appliances (e.g., conflicts, priorities, goals).
- To develop mechanisms to represent (possibly formalize) such preferences and rules in a way that makes the system easily and dynamically configurable.
- To define the mechanisms through which the rules are executed in the smart home in order to guarantee that the user-defined objectives are met.
Project Scope
A team tackling this project should address all issues, from preference definition to their execution. However, a team might decide to focus more on some parts rather than others (e.g., more on the formal definition of rules and the avoidance of conflicts, or more on the runtime – possibly dynamic – management of rules, and so on).
Process Requirements
There are no specific requirements on the process to be followed. Teams might use a formal approach for defining the management rules, though this is by no means a must.
Environmental Constraints
There are no environmental constraints. Teams can consider, if they want, experimenting with the JEMMA framework developed by Energy@Home (http://jemma.energy-home.org/), which allows for the communication with smart devices.
Level of Sponsor Involvement
The sponsor is willing to interact with teams who select this project to clarify their doubts and provide feedback about what is expected of the application. However, on issues concerning the user experience with the application, such as the interfaces and mechanisms to manage the rules controlling the appliances in the home, teams are advised and encouraged to find potential users and interact with them to determine their needs and expectations.
Sponsor contact: matteo.rossi@polimi.it (please add [SE4YH] as tag to the message)
Project Restrictions
None.
Project FAQ
Answers to selected questions will appear here.