Planning in a Smart Home: Visualization and Simulation?

The area of pervasive systems is characterized by high heterogeneity, with thou-sands of autonomous devices living together, and requiring high level of inter-operation. In particular, domotics is concerned with the pervasion of technology into housing, in order to make homes more pro-active and improve the level of security and comfort of their inhabitants. In this work, we bring intelligence into smart homes, that is, homes that contain interactive and pro-active devices, and are able to adapt their behavior to the needs of the home inhabitants through extensive interoperation and user interaction. For example, a movie may be automatically paused when the user leaves the room, and then launched again when he/she is back; windows are automatically opened to regulate the air condition or as a reaction to gas leak, and so on. To deal with such complex scenarios we use a planning system that synthesizes plans on-the-fly, based on goals given by the home inhabitants. 2 General architecture A general architecture of the system is shown in Figure 2. The goal is specified through one of the possible interfaces, be it a brain-computing interface, a mobile device, voice-recognition, or some other piece of software. Given a goal, the planner collects the information about the current state of the house, e.g. the available services and their current states, through the context module, which may possibly prefetch the data for better performance. A plan that satisfies the specified goal is synthesized, and then passed to the orchestration component which is responsible for the plan execution. To execute a particular action, the orchestration component finds one of the possible services that implement the desired action. Some extra constraints may be associated in this case to reduce possible instantiations. For example, the alarm action ma