Federal Smart House Regulator (FSHR): A Self-Managing and Ecosystemic Approach to Resource Management, Automation, and Sustainability in Smart Houses
In this work, a decentralized, cloud-supported management of smart house is proposed using autonomous ICT agents we call Federal Smart House Regulators (FSHRs). The proposed management solution is hybrid in that sense that it takes full control of 'resource access' while at the same time give freedom to other entities presented in the house ecosystem, i.e., the appliances, to operate at their best capabilities. To enforce the resource-related decisions made by the FSHR, a series of resource gateways are considered in the solution. A greedy but fair and smart algorithm is also proposed as part of scheduling module of the FSHR in order to enable almost real-time operation of the solution which is a critical requirement for highly heterogeneous and dynamic house ecosystems. The proposed FSHR solution is by definition vendor agnostic because it allows entrance of any appliance in the ecosystem as long as they are authenticated by the house owner or the FSHR authority and also if they follow the basic FSHR requirements for resource request and utilization. Each FSHR agent is linked using the Telco connections to the FSHR support-cloud that ensures reliable state of the deployed intelligence and code in the FSHR modules and also provides trusted profiles of external variables such as resource price. The solution is highly localized within the premises of the house and therefore it could achieve high level of trust and adoption of house owners at scales. In addition, an object-oriented simulator is developed to evaluate the scalability and performance of the solution at various scales from a single house to a province.