Intelligent Energy Optimization for User Intelligible Goals in Smart Home Environments

Intelligent management of energy consumption is one of the key issues for future energy distribution systems, smart buildings, and consumer appliances. The problem can be tackled both from the point of view of the utility provider, with the intelligence embedded in the smart grid, or from the point of view of the consumer, thanks to suitable local energy management systems (EMS). Conserving energy, however, should respect the user requirements regarding the desired state of the environment, therefore an EMS should constantly and intelligently find the balance between user requirements and energy saving. The paper proposes a solution to this problem, based on explicit high-level modeling of user intentions and automatic control of device states through the solution and optimization of a constrained Boolean satisfiability problem. The proposed approach has been integrated into a smart environment framework, and promising preliminary results are reporte

Home Energy Consumption Feedback: A User Survey

Buildings account for a relevant fraction of the energy consumed by a country, up to 20-40% of the yearly energy consumption. If only electricity is considered, the fraction is even bigger, reaching around 73% of the total electricity consumption, equally divided into residential and commercial dwellings. Building and Home Automation have a potential to profoundly impact current and future buildings' energy efficiency by informing users about their current consumption patterns, by suggesting more efficient behaviors, and by pro-actively changing/modifying user actions for reducing the associated energy wastes. In this paper we investigate the capability of an automated home to automatically, and timely, inform users about energy consumption, by harvesting opinions of residential inhabitants on energy feedback interfaces. We report here the results of an on-line survey, involving nearly a thousand participants, about feedback mechanisms suggested by the research community, with the goal of understanding what feedback is felt by home inhabitants easier to understand, more likely to be used, and more effective in promoting behavior changes. Contextually, we also collect and distill users' attitude towards in-home energy displays and their preferred locations, gathering useful insights on user-driven design of more effective in-home energy display

Effects of group performance feedback and goal-setting in an organisational energy intervention

End-user energy demand (EUED) in the workplace is affected by a complex interaction between behavioural, social, technological, regulatory and organisational factors. Designing technology-led interventions to encourage pro-environmental behaviour that acknowledge and support this complexity is a significant challenge. This paper discusses the design and evaluation of an EUED intervention implemented in the corporate infrastructure of a UK university administration department. Two intervention types, group feedback and group goal-setting were implemented. 16 participants were recruited and engaged with a four stage study (baseline, group feedback, group goal setting, and baseline) for a duration of 4 months. This study design allowed us to track clearly any changes in mid-term energy usage behaviour during and beyond intervention. Findings suggest that, surprisingly, participant energy consumption increased during the intervention period compared to baseline conditions. These results demonstrate that simple group-based behaviour change methods can be counter-productive in the workplace, illustrating the complex and unpredictable nature of intervention in this design space

ICT for sustainability: reflecting on the role of ICT to enhance communication and empowerment of building users

ICT solutions within a Smart City environment are often hailed as the low carbon, efficient and low-cost solution – but is this sufficient? These solutions often neglect user behaviour and treat users as passive consumers or even obstacles. Energy related ICT behaviour change is also starting to appear more frequently at the forefront of policy agendas and research funding calls as a prime focus for reducing energy consumption and improving efficiency across all energy intensive sectors. Research shows that improving and widening user engagement has the potential to foster greater acceptance and impact. Recent research has focused on behaviour change towards more sustainable energy use, often involving users co-designing interventions. As such, ICT is a prominent tool, with its application including feedback tools, apps, interactive dashboards and gamification. Frequent barriers are user engagement with ICT tools, both initially and over the long term, with research consistently showing that users are hard to engage, face a complex array of competing demands and easily become disengaged with energy programs and interventions. This paper presents a summary of some of the common problems relating to user engagement with energy interventions faced by many research projects, as well as presenting findings from eTEACHER, an EU H2020 project, aimed at empowering energy end-users by enabling behaviour change via a set of ICT solutions. eTEACHER, aims to employ principles of user-involvement and engagement to enhance the design of an ICT-based tool promoting energy conservation in buildings. eTEACHER has applied the ‘Enabling Change’ framework as a novel approach to ensure user engagement and stakeholder involvement. Results and reflections are offered from eTEACHER’s implementation of the Enabling Change framework and the engagement of building users within the eTEACHER pilot buildings, surrounding the design and implementation of an ICT-based tool. Reflections are given throughout on rethinking how we engage with citizens and our success in identifying, engaging and eliciting feedback from building users. The real-world issues and constraints are explored alongside, and opportunities are identified for improving energy efficiency using an evidence-based intervention design in practice and discusses how ICT can aid the empowerment of building users towards their own energy use

Challenges in developing a generic monitoring framework for pan-European energy usage and environmental monitoring

The ability to easily monitor different aspects of the environment is essential to achieve the aspirations of smart homes, smart buildings and smart cities across Europe. A wide range of sensors are available for both the domestic and commercial markets to enable different aspects of the environment to be monitored. These sensors are disparate, requiring different interfaces and utilizing conflicting data formats. This paper reports on the development of a generic monitoring framework to capture and analyse data from ubiquitous sensing devices in smart cities. The framework has been tested by capturing energy usage data from both public and commercial buildings, and domestic homes in three cities across two European countries. Dashboards were created to enable facility managers and home owners to compare energy usage with similar buildings in different cities. The paper discusses the technical and data quality challenges encountered with capturing data from domestic and non-domestic buildings and highlights the need for a generic context framework to support monitoring and analysis of the pan-European data captured