2016 IEEE 5th Global Conference on Consumer Electronics
Rule-based Conflict Resolution Framework for Internet of Things
Device Management in Smart Home Environment
Thinagaran Perumal1, Md Nasir Sulaiman1, Soumya Kanti Datta2, Thinaharan Ramachandran1, Chui Yew Leong
1Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Malaysia
2
Co-Founder, Future Tech Lab, India
Emails - thinagaran@upm.edu.my, skd@future-tech-lab.com
Abstract – Recent developments in Internet of Things (IoT)
tremendously have introduced several heterogeneous systems
and devices that characterize a smart home. Generally, these
heterogeneous systems are dissimilar and accomplish various
services and functionalities. Due to the gradual changes of
managing resources in smart home, more heterogeneous
systems are being introduced from time to time depending on
the consumer requirement. As such, more dependencies are
created among heterogeneous systems, and this could lead
towards conflict occurrences among them. Conflicts could
occur in smart home when two or more events generated by
heterogeneous systems need to be triggered at an instance of
time. In this paper, we present a rule-based conflict resolution
framework using scheduling algorithm for managing
heterogeneous systems in smart home environment. Events are
captured and processed by the framework which performs
corresponding conflict resolution on the heterogeneous
systems. The developed framework was implemented with
several heterogeneous systems to validate their effectiveness in
solving conflict occurrences. The framework was ascertained to
be consistent in smart home environment.
Keywords - Smart home environment; ECA; Conflict
resolution.
I. INTRODUCTION
With rapid technological advancements in consumer
devices and emerging networking infrastructure, a smart
home environment is more intricately connected with
heterogeneous systems to networks and are bound with
multiple services. A smart home environment [5] is an entity
with various Internet of Things (IoT) common service
functions for managing its environment [1], [4].
Heterogeneous systems in smart home environment
comprise of devices like, CCTV cameras, energy
management units, fire alarms, and other network based
devices. A typical smart home environment is often
implemented under a centralized architecture as shown in
Figure 1 below:
Figure 1: Heterogeneous IoT devices in smart home environment
From Figure 1, these heterogeneous IoT devices ensure
the goal of the home dwellers needs towards comfort living
978-1-5090-2333-2/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE
and efficiency within a building environment.
Heterogeneous IoT devices offer anticipation of home
dweller’s intentions and subsequently taking proactive
action to assist them in their daily tasks. However, the vision
of these truly smart home environment has often been
ambiguous, since many systems do not execute predefined
structures of actions and accomplish common triggering rule
sets [2]. An event refers to interoperation that triggers of
actions to be taken by the IoT device, with typical actions
resulting from a particular condition satisfied accordingly.
These events carry information on system status, conditions
and action triggers that required for complete functionality
of a heterogeneous system. When distinct devices or system
interact with building environment, their events are bespoke,
often produces conflicting action which the building
environment need to identify and perform actions
autonomously. In general setting, such conflicting situations
should be solved amicably by smart home environment for
total interoperability. To solve the conflict occurrences, it is
essential to analyze the dependencies among heterogeneous
systems and also diagnosing conflicts autonomously. With
that aim, we present a rule-based conflict resolution
framework that handles conflict among heterogeneous
systems using weighted-priority scheduling algorithm. The
framework is based on Event-Condition-Action (ECA)
rules, promises to be an effective means of representing,
sharing and managing IoT data in smart home environment.
The outline of the paper is as follow. Section 2 elaborates
the framework and Section 3 the experimental result.
Finally, conclusions are drawn in Section 4.
II. RULE-BASED CONFLICT RESOLUTION
FRAMEWORK
The rule-based conflict resolution framework is
implemented using a home server integrated with Web
Services, five different heterogeneous IoT systems with a
conflict resolution module based on Event-Condition-Action
(ECA) rules. The framework architecture is shown in Figure
2 below.
As illustrated in Figure 2 above, events generated by
heterogeneous systems in smart home environment are
synchronized and updated via Conflict Resolution module
and screened based on their predefined priority. The
Conflict Resolution module is implemented based on
weighted scheduling mechanism. This weighted scheduling
mechanism is known as ECA Priority Scheme (EPS). Using
EPS, if corresponding received event is enabled with highest
priority, then the event weight is queried. The EPS
algorithm is depicted as in Figure 3 below.
 2016 IEEE 5th Global Conference on Consumer Electronics

From Table 1, it is clearly evident that both IoT Lighting

Figure 2: Framework Architecture of ECA Conflict Resolution
Algorithm: Priority Weighted Data Scheduling
While event(s) received from system(s)
Do
The received events will be check based on ECA rules to meet
conditions rules.
The action will be activated based on rules (ECA rules)
If activated rule >1 then
The weighted priorities of activated conditions are calculated.
It checks the queue headers(QH) whether system is higher priority
than other system(s) or not
If rule condition is with highest weighted priority, then
Trigger the system event (Action);
Else
Queue the current system(s) based on high priority and
weight.
End if
Else
Queue the current system(s) based on high priority and
weight.
Select the system from Queue with high priority and weight;
Trigger the system event (action);
End if
End While
Figure 3: Heterogeneous IoT Systems ECA Priority Scheme (EPS)
III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
For experimental design and evaluation, five different
heterogeneous IoT systems are evaluated together with the
framework to express their ability for joint execution tasks
during conflict occurrences. The approximated response
time value of five heterogeneous IoT systems with and
without conflict resolution in smart home environment is
illustrated in Table 1.
Table 1: Average Response time (ms) of Proposed Model with and Without
Conflict Resolution
and IoT Alarm data reflects the fastest response time, 123ms
with conflict resolution. In comparison, the response time
for both systems was lower, 24.6ms in the case of without
conflict resolution. The difference is throughput gain for
both systems, IoT Lighting and IoT Alarm is justified
despite being safety critical in nature. On the other hand,
the response time for IoT Temperature, IoT Security and
IoT Humidity are 139ms with the presence of conflict
resolution. In contrast, these systems produced 27.8ms in the
case of without conflict resolution. Here, it noteworthy to
mention that proposed model is able to detect unpredictable
behavior in terms of conflict to reach heterogeneous system
reliability in smart home environment, compared to previous
model that do not consider any form of conflict schema.
With conflict resolution framework, the reason for the
increase in throughput gain is because the framework needs
to check and confirm the priority level of the incoming
events. Hence, the time consumed to process the events is
affected. However, this is compensated by an increase in
throughput for high priority data. In contrast, events without
conflict, events only need to be processed without
undergoing conflict detection as well as no throughput gain.
From the performance analysis, we discover that the impact
of delay on the throughput achieved for events with conflict
are well justified.
IV. CONCLUSION
The key idea of the proposed framework is to provide an
efficient conflict detection using scheduling algorithm that
could ensure operations of heterogeneous IoT systems in a
federated manner. The advantages of the developed
framework are to have greater control over events generated
by bespoke devices in smart home environment setting.
REFERENCES
[1] Perumal, T., M.N. Sulaiman, and C.Y. Leong, ECA-based
interoperability framework for smart home environment. Automation
in Construction, 2013. 31: p. 274-280.
[2] Carreira, P., S. Resendes, and A.C. Santos, “Towards automatic
conflict detection in home and building automation systems”,
Pervasive and Mobile Computing, 2013.
[3] Leong.CY, A.R.Ramli and T.Perumal, “A Rule-based framework for
heterogeneous subsystems management in smart home environment,
IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, 55(3), pp.1208-1213.
[4] S. K. Datta, A. Gyrard, C. Bonnet and K. Boudaoud, "oneM2M
Architecture Based User Centric IoT Application Development,"
Future Internet of Things and Cloud (FiCloud), 2015 3rd International
Conference on, Rome, 2015, pp. 100-107.
[5] S. K. Datta, C. Bonnet, A. Gyrard, R. P. Ferreira da Costa and K.
Boudaoud, "Applying Internet of Things for personalized healthcare
in smart homes," Wireless and Optical Communication Conference
(WOCC), 2015 24th, Taipei, 2015, pp. 164-169.

Average Run- IoT IoT IoT IoT IoT

Time Lighting Temperature Alarm Security Humidity

Without 24.6 27.8 24.6 27.8 27.8

Conflict
Resolution

With 123 139 123 139 139

Conflict
Resolution