Advanced smart home appliances and new models of energy tariffs imposed
by energy providers pose new challenges in the automation of home energy
management. Users need some assistant tool that helps them to make complex decisions
with different goals, depending on the current situation. Multi-agent systems
have proved to be a suitable technology to develop self-management systems,
able to take the most adequate decision under different context-dependent situations,
like the home energy management. The heterogeneity of home appliances
and also the changes in the energy policies of providers introduce the necessity of
explicitly modeling this variability. But, multi-agent systems lack of mechanisms
to effectively deal with the different degrees of variability required by these kinds
of systems. Software Product Line technologies, including variability models, has
been successfully applied to different domains to explicitly model any kind of variability.
We have defined a software product line development process that performs
a model driven generation of agents embedded in heterogeneous smart objects with
different degrees of self-management. However, once deployed, the home energy
assistant system has to be able to evolve to self-adapt its decision making or devices
to new requirements. So, in this paper we propose a model driven mechanism to
automatically manage the evolution of multi-agent systems distributed among several
devices.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech
