Abstract
The continuous migration of people towards cities has led to an increase
in resource consumption among homes, primarily in terms of energy and
water. This phenomenon calls for resource management solutions in an
attempt to drive sustainable consumption patterns. Among these solutions
lie Home Automation Systems (HAS) capable of monitoring and controlling
different appliances so as to deliver services such as appliance control
and security surveillance. As in most HAS architectures today, these
appliances are uniquely identified and connected to the Internet, as in
Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Though, despite their potential, such
architectures generally fail to address four essential features
altogether: easy adaptability, access to remote services,
interoperability and software portability. In this work, we propose a
reference HAS architecture which implements the previous features. Our
approach is based on the synergy between the FIWARE IoT middleware and a
multi-agent system (MAS), leading to an autonomous IoT (AIoT) system. To
demonstrate the applicability of this architecture and to evaluate its
potential to drive sustainable resource consumption, we have deployed a
Home Energy Management System (HEMS) in accordance with the proposed
architecture, and gathered results of various simulations of a home
environment managed by the HEMS. Our results suggest that the HEMS can
aid home-owners in decision making, raise awareness as of their resource
consumption profiles, and provoke behavioral changes leading to more
sustainable consumption patterns.