A Multi-agent Coordination Framework for Smart Building Energy Management

This paper presents a novel energy management framework for multi-agent coordination in smart buildings. The framework builds on top of an existing Service-Oriented middleware for Ambient Intelligence, which offers sensor and actuator functions of wireless devices. The middleware also provides a semantics infrastructure that assists in authoring agent policies for reducing energy consumption and maximizing user comfort. Each agent within the framework is responsible for monitoring the environmental context and controlling the electrical appliances of a specific room. However, the collective behavior of the multi-agent system is controlled by a Coordinator Agent that approves or rejects the allocation of building resources in time, aiming at more "long-term" goals that are out of the reach and scope of the individual Room Agents. The agents' underlying logic is expressed via defeasible logics, a formalism offering intuitive knowledge representation and advanced conflict resolution mechanisms.