2009 Third UKSim European Symposium on Computer Modeling and Simulation

Building Automation Simulator and Control Strategy for Intelligent and Energy Efficient Home
Pavel Kordk
Dept. of Computer Science, FIT Czech Technical University in Prague Prague, Czech Republic kordikp@fit.cvut.cz

Martin Hasaj, Marek Tvrd, Miroslav norek

Dept. of Computer Science, FEL Czech Technical University in Prague Prague, Czech Republic

AbstractAn intelligent building automation system can manage many devices in order to balance the energy savings and comfort of the inhabitants. The strategy controlling devices has to be adaptive and learn to match users needs. Based on the Amigo framework, we developed a simulator of a household. We added lights, devices, pheromone controlled inhabitants, physical model of heat loss, etc. The system runs real-time and a simple strategy was used to control heat, lights and other devices. In this simulator, we plan to evaluate several different control strategies in term of energy efficiency and user comfort. We also proposed an adaptive control strategy, based on the neural networks induced on data from sensors and user interaction signals. We built an experimental KNXbus platform demonstrating the feasibility of our concept. Building automation; control strategy simulator; KNX bus; Amigo; intelligent home; adaptive control; neural network

I.

INTRODUCTION

A smart home has to be energy efficient as well. However, the energy efficiency is often contrary requirement to the comfort of inhabitants. The task of an intelligent building automation system is to balance the energy efficiency and users comfort. The energy efficiency can be precisely measured. On the other hand, comfort is very subjective and has to be estimated indirectly from user interaction with the control system. Our goal is to develop an intelligent and energy efficient building automation system. The first step is to choose the technology and then to build a simulator, allowing us to design, validate and benchmark several different automation strategies. We have decided to use the Amigo environment [1] offering suitable communication standard and the KNX bus [20, 21, and 22] as a hardware platform. We have added several modules to the Amigo environment and extended it by a simulator in order to create a virtual testing environment for the automation strategies. Modules and the simulator are described in the next section. Our first automation strategy was very straight forward. For example if there is nobody in a room for a certain time, switch off the lights and decrease heating (air conditioning). Even this simple strategy can save a lot of energy compared to a building without automation. The problem of this strategy is that it does not reflect users habits and it is static.

The comfort of inhabitants and the energy efficiency can be increased when the automation system adapts to their habits. Appropriate tool for adaptive control are the Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). They have been already used for the building automation, automated home appliances, modeling of user behavior, etc. In the following, we review some of the significant applications involving ANNs approaches in intelligent home environment. Chan et al. [2] was probably the first one who mentioned ANN possibility to manage the needs of an elderly and disabled people in a smart home environment. He has spread out the sensors inside twelve rooms to observe the life situations of inhabitants. According to an acquired data, the ANNs were trained to classify normal and abnormal behaviors. The first comprehensive application involving ANNs in smart home environment was undertaken by Mozer [3] in 1998. The project was called ACHE, which stands for adaptive control of home environments. ACHE was a prototype which was programming itself by observing lifestyle and desires of inhabitants. It had controlled basic systems like air heating and ventilation, water heating and lighting. It had two main goals. To configure appliances like vents and AC to start and stop without users active interaction according to behavioral pattern recorded for a period of time. When user has changed the settings it was a signal for the system that user was not satisfied and observed pattern needs to be change. Second goal was to conserve energy and as such, expenditures on energy consuming appliances. Lights should be set to the minimum intensity required; hot water should be maintained at the minimum temperature needed to satisfy the demand; only rooms that are likely to be occupied in the near future should be heated; when several options exist to heat a room (e.g., furnace, ceiling fans forcing hot air down, opening blinds to admit sunlight), the alternative minimizing expected energy consumption should be selected. Mozer has found that these two goals are contradicting and he proposed formula called Optimal Control to count best ratio between those two goals in smart home environment, to optimize the comfort level of the residents with least possible amount of energy being consumed. Another research of an application of the Neural Networks to help elderly and even patients in hospital was undertaken by Jorge and Goncalves [4]. They have used term

978-0-7695-3886-0/09 $26.00 2009 IEEE DOI 10.1109/EMS.2009.104

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of ubiquitous computing to name the artificial intelligent which collects data. They have used bundle of sensors all around the place to collect data and ANNs to search for patterns. In the targeted group, there were people with neurological disorders (e.g. loss of motor, sensorial and cognitive problems). The challenge for the system was to distinguish between relatively healthy inhabitants and people suffering with mentioned diseases who may potentially need special assistants based on the available information. For such a problem, the rules and patterns which are evaluated by the systems must be unique and specific for each and every individual. In this regard ANN techniques could potentially play significant role in process of decision making. Another work devoted to caring elderly was written by Pigot et al. [5]. He has proposed a theoretical and practical framework to minimize risks that may arise due to living situations of elderly in real life physical environment. He has connected sensors through the middleware with the application which consists of modules responsible for partial decisions. Tele-monitoring module was one of the modules responsible for detecting abnormal behaviors of the monitored persons. The authors emphasized the advantage of applying the ANNs along with other mathematical models to help with the detection of risky situations. Project MavHome was developed by Cook et al. [7] focused on creation of system which acts in environment as an intelligent agent. MavHome has concerned the control of temperature, all kinds of electrical appliances, audio-video, etc. MavHome has been defined as a unique agent, which combined technologies from artificial intelligence, machine learning, databases, mobile computing, robotics and multimedia computing. To achieve the goals the several algorithms has been employed in parallel: the SHIP prediction algorithm, Active LeZi (ALZ) online algorithm, and data mining algorithm known as Episode Discovery. In the final decision phase, the so called Predictor, the metaengine based on a back propagation ANN was applied to learn the confidence value for each of the prediction algorithms, the accuracy strength and the meta-features (i.e., amount of data, number of devices, etc.) R-Illengworth et al. [8] has used an agent architecture to detect daily routines (e.g., eating, sleeping) from the collected data from sensors. These patterns were recognized with temporal capabilities. Consequently, abnormal behaviors were also identified using this algorithm. Author tried to concentrate on the function of ANN as the main classification mechanism and tried to remain away the difficulties interconnected with the consecutively changing environment of the smart home. The focus was taken on the elimination of requirement of retraining of the ANN after change which it should take into the account like adding/removing input/output nodes. The authors used the adaptive neural architecture, first proposed by Kasabov [9], known as EcoS (Evolving Connectionist System), which was found suitable for the environmental data. A memory layer has been added to the model to handle temporal data and detect abnormalities in the sequence, frequency and duration of the activities.

The authors applied this model, in conjunction with 18 sensors, for activity recognition and to identify abnormalities inside a dormitory room at the University of Essex. Ju Hang et al. [10] tried to redefines the concept and connotation of Intelligent Buildings, analyzes the influence of ANN on the development of IB, analyses many subsystems of IB which are time-variant nonlinearity complex system, discusses the role of learning in IB control systems, and further elaborates on the application of ANN in the construction of system model, designing control, and the intelligent air-conditioning. Machado and Mendes et al. [11] introduced the ubiquitous computing system vision, where the users action patterns are captured, recorded and used to create the context awareness that allows the self-configuration of the home automation system. The system tries to free users from setup adjustments as the home tries to adapt to its inhabitants real habits. A completely automated process was described to determine the lights states and act on them, taking in account the users daily habits. Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was used as a pattern recognition method, classifying each moment the lights states. The work presented used data from a real house where a family was actually living. Begg and Hassan et al. [19] have collected all the theoretical conclusions of their predecessors and wrote paper about possibilities of the ANNs to help elderly and disabled people. They even proposed health monitoring system with automatically responding actuators which could possibly replace the nurses and housekeepers and prevent the health damage of inhabitants. They have proposed an integrated framework for the smart home which could handle such situations. It is working with all the aspects of life like health monitoring, behavior monitoring, entertainment, security and safety and care-giving. It collects the data from sensors and use middleware for the preprocessing to extract important data and pass them to the processing unit. The ANNs engine was chosen as processing unit. Our advanced control strategy is based on inductive neural networks. Networks are induced on data from sensors and user interaction signals. Refer to the Section VI of this paper for more detailed description of the strategy. We also developed an experimental KNX-bus hardware platform demonstrating the feasibility of our concept. The Calimero open source project (Erb et al. 2007) was extended to show adaptive behavior of our inductive neural network based control strategy on real hardware. As a future work, we plan to use our Amigo simulator with the KNX-bus platform. II. AMIGO BASED SIMULATOR The Amigo Architecture [1, 2, and 3] offers interoperability at several levels; it integrates the most important existing technologies in terms of service platforms, programming paradigms, middleware protocols. Amigo offers support between heterogeneous service platforms. The Amigo Services move intelligence into the network, which enables thin client approach.

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Figure 1. The Amigo service modules with our extensions Simulator Service and Device Service (lights, heater).

Figure 3. Vantage point visualization of simple scenario (5 rooms and three inhabitants).

In the Figure 1, we show interactions of service modules within the Amigo platform. We have added the Simulator Service and Device Services for lights and heaters. Our services [29] simulate the hardware layer (inputs from sensors). The Simulator service contains physical model of temperature in rooms, it simulates behavior of inhabitants.

Using this tool, we can verify that our simulation is working well and display many system variables in a comprehensible graphical form. The rest of the variables (temperature in rooms, levels of hormones, day light, etc.) are displayed in a next application frame. We have evaluated a simple control strategy to save the energy lights are off, when nobody is in a room, temperature is slowly decreasing. This strategy is energy efficient, but sometimes, it is at the expense of inhabitants comfort. To increase the comfort of inhabitants, we have to somehow predict their future moves and adapt the control strategy to their habits. We are using inductive neural networks to achieve this goal. III. INDUCTIVE NEURAL NETWORKS The Group of Adaptive Models Evolution (GAME) algorithm produces inductive neural networks. It combines neurons of several different transfer functions within one neural network (see Fig. 4).

Figure 2. The level of hormones over time for one inhabitant (Joe). When red hormone is bellow a threshold, Joe goes to the toilet, with low green hormone, Joe is hungry and goes to the kitchen and the blue hormone urges Joe to socialize himself in the living room.

First layer of neurons Input variables ... ...

Gaussian

x1 x2 ... xn

Linear

2nd layer of models

y = ai xi + an +1
i =1

The simulation of inhabitants is controlled by level of hormones. These hormones [29] urge inhabitants to move to the specific rooms. See Figure 2 for record of hormone levels of one typical inhabitant. Of course, this model is extremely simple and our future work is to get closer to the complex behavior of people. We use VantagePoint [25] for real time visualization of scenarios. The VantagePoint is Java open source tool that visualizes semantic context information in Web Ontology Language (OWL) using Jena Semantic Web framework. VantagePoint provides a possibility to build contextual models of different environments without requiring any particular knowledge of ontologies. In Figure 3, we display simple scenario showing positions of inhabitants and the state of devices (lights and heaters).

Ratio nal

Neural net output

Sigmoid
x1 x2 ... xn
m n r y = ai x j + a0 i =1 j =1

Polynomial

Neurons in layer evolved by genetic algorithm

Figure 4. An example of GAME inductive neural network generated layer by layer using the niching genetic algorithm consists of neurons with different transfer functions. The complexity of the network increases together with the classification accuracy on the validation dataset.

The structure, connections and type of neurons are evolved by means of special niching genetic algorithm. The
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parameters of neurons are adjusted by gradient based optimization methods (e.g. Quasi-Newton) on training data subset, whereas from validation subset, the fitness of neurons is computed. Evolved structure reflects on the complexity of data set and relationships of system variables. For detailed description of the GAME method, please refer to [12]. In next sections, we are going to evaluate the capability of inductive neural networks to learn habits from data. IV. EXPERIMENT WITH ARTIFICIAL DATA To build an inductive network, training data are needed. We have generated several sample scenarios to evaluate if the network is capable to learn relations between sensors and desired control commands.

The resulting inductive neural network, generated from this data set is displayed in the Figure 7.

Figure 7. The inductive neural network generated using the GAME algorithm. Inputs from sensors are processed by network of neurons and the output neuron (biggest circle) controls the hall light (0-off,1-on).

Figure 5. A dataset generated to verify capability of inductive networks controlling hall light and bathroom light based on inputs from several neighboring sensors.

The data set (Figure 5) was generated using the state automaton in the Figure 6.

In this hall light scenario, the neural network was able to learn the control strategy (all testing data was classified correctly). However in some scenarios, we were unable to construct inductive network with sufficient accuracy. When we analyzed the data, we found conflicting patterns (for identical input signals from sensors, different actions are required). We found that some actions are dependent also on historical state of sensors. In the next experiment, we have solved this problem. V. EXPERIMENT WITH TIME DELAYED SENSOR SIGNALS The coffee scenario contained conflicting patterns. Therefore we have enriched the data set by historical states of sensors.

Figure 6. The state automaton used to generate a data set to evaluate capability of inductive neural networks to control lights in hall.

Figure 8. The output neuron (big circle) controls the coffee heater. GAME network uses also historical values of sensors.

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The resulting neural network is in the Figure 8. It learned to heat coffee based on actual and historical states of sensors in the neighborhood. The advantage of inductive neural networks is that it can be also written in the form of expressions.

In this simple experiment, all testing data were classified correctly. The expression is quite short and can be instantly evaluated. For more complex scenarios (e.g. hall light scenario), expressions are much longer. The advantage of GAME networks is that only relevant input sensors are used and other are ignored. Later, networks are trained directly using data from sensors. VI. THE DESIGN OF THE INDUCTIVE CONTROL STRATEGY

Figure 9. The data flow diagram showing how data sets and models (controlling individual devices) are maintained within our application.

The next section describes the Teiresias application we are developing to run our inductive control strategy on the KNX-bus platform. VII. KNX-BUS PLATFORM KNX [20] is an international standard for home automation which is based on EIB (European Installation Bus), Batibus and EHS (European Home Systems). The communication protocol of KNX can be used over different physical media [21], such as twisted pair wires, power line, radio, or IP/Ethernet. It suggests three modes of configuration [23] which differ in the complexity of the device and the experience required to install this devices. The Calimero open source project [24] provides a collection of Java APIs to build KNX applications including remote access and control. KNX@Home [23] deals with the control of KNX/EIB devices via HTTP. We have implemented Teiresias application [29] (see Figure 11) in order to demonstrate our adaptive control strategy on a real hardware. Our current KNX-bus platform contains a few lights and switches to emulate user interaction with the intelligent home. In the future, we plan to extend the number of devices, to be able to show more complex scenarios.

Our experiments with artificially generated data proved that inductive neural networks are capable to learn habits and adapt to patterns in human behavior. In this section we describe overall design of our control strategy based on inductive networks. The data-flow is depicted in the Figure 10. It shows that inputs from sensors are stored in a database. From this database, training data are prepared for each inductive network (GAME model). The inductive network is generated for each device, we need to control. For each network, sensors that can possibly influence a controlled device are used as an input features. Output is the state of controlled device that is occasionally changed by inhabitants or the control system. Inhabitants only correct the wrong decisions of the control system. When conflicting patterns are detected, historical values of input sensors are added to the training set. All networks are validated on a testing data set. Every night, new data are loaded from the database and the training data are updated. Inductive networks are built again. It can be also immediately re-generated upon request from inhabitants.

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[4] [5]

[6]

[7]

[8] [9]

[10] [11] [12]

[13] Figure 10. The Teiresias application and its interaction with environment. [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22]

Also, our future work is to control devices connected via KNX-bus from our Amigo simulator and to compare the efficiency of several control strategies in this simulator. VIII. CONCLUSION We have extended the Amigo framework in order to simulate behavior of inhabitants, heat loss and several new devices. In this simulator we would like to evolve most efficient control strategy. We have proposed and evaluated a strategy based on inductive neural networks and showed it is capable to learn user habits. We demonstrate it on the KNXbus based hardware platform. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This research is partially supported by the grant Automated Knowledge Extraction (KJB201210701) of the Grant Agency of the Academy of Science of the Czech Republic and the research program "Transdisciplinary Research in the Area of Biomedical Engineering II" (MSM6840770012) sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic. REFERENCES
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