ITEE Innovation Expo 2008 : Project Details

Intelligent Agents in the Smart House

This project looks at developing intelligent agents to control a virtual smart house.

A smart house is a house consisting of items, sensors and a control unit which receives information from the sensors and controls the items. Smart houses can increase the comfort, safety and energy efficiency of the house.

In this project intelligent agents make up the control unit of the house. The inhabitants of the house have their own personal agent. These agents are made up of two parts: low level teleo-reactive programs that encode the person's preferences and evaluate sensor information; and higher level belief-desire-intention agents which negotiate with other personal agents. The use of low level teleo-reactive programs to encode the person's preferences, along with subscription/notification communication, means that this approach is very flexible, making it easy to modify a person's preferences and to incorporate more sensors and items into the house.

Alongside the personal agents there are energy management agents with a similar design whose purpose is to try and reduce the energy consumption of the house. Instead of encoding personal preferences their teleo-reactive programs encode rules to reduce energy consumption.

In order to experiment with the agents and their behaviour this project also includes a virtual model of a smart house. The state of the model can be easily changed and interactions of inhabitants with the model can be recorded and then replayed.