Comfont: A semantic framework for indoor comfort and energy saving in smart homes

This work introduces ComfOnt, a semantic framework developed within the context of ambient assisted living, context awareness, and ambient intelligence Italian research projects. ComfOnt leverages knowledge regarding Smart Home inhabitants and their particular needs, the devices deployed inside the domestic environment (appliances, sensors, and actuators), the amount of their energy consumption, and indoor comfort metrics to provide dwellers with customized services. Developed reusing widely adopted ontologies, ComfOnt aims at providing inhabitants with the possibility of having personalized indoor comfort in their living environments and at helping them in scheduling their daily activities requiring appliances; in fact, the proposed semantic framework enables the representation of appliances’ energy consumption and the energy profile of the Smart Home, thus assisting the dwellers in avoiding power cuts and fostering energy savings. ComfOnt serves as a knowledge base for a prototypical application (DECAM) dedicated to Smart Home inhabitants; the architecture and the functionalities of DECAM are here presented.