Coordinating services embedded everywhere via hierarchical planning

The spaces we live in are provided with different devices and technologies, such as sensors for recognising our presence. The aim of such spaces is to improve our comfort, productivity, and even reduce our energy bills. The problem with fulfilling the aim is that devices alone cannot do much to achieve such difficult goals. People would also have problems in manually searching for the best situation accomplishing their needs. A way to deal with this problem is to coordinate devices automatically. For example, our home can autonomously figure out that some lamps can be turned off because the living room has enough natural light and the activity we are currently doing requires a low light level. The benefits are improved comfort and a reasonable amount of energy saved. We therefore explore the possibilities of using a system based on automated planning. This planning produces a set of device services, such as turn off a lamp, that achieves a given goal. We use a method, called hierarchical planning, which enables us to organise the knowledge we have about spaces and devices in hierarchical forms. We show that planning is suitable for this kind of problems by using hierarchical planning to save energy in the Bernoulliborg building at the University of Groningen. The results show energy and money savings, and that people are satisfied with our system. We also improve the system and show that even more money can be saved without sacrificing the well-being of people if we can buy energy from several energy providers