This paper presents a real-world application targeting energy savings and user comfort in a Smart Building environment. The proposed system uses various heterogeneous networks of wireless sensors and actuators, while all functions and data are unified under a Semantic Web Service middleware. An initial approach to author and enforce energy-saving policies was to develop a reactive agent that maintains an internal representation of the world‟s state in the form of predicates and facts, gathered over the Web Service interface. System administrators are able to encode the policies, the effects of which are applied by invoking actuator Web Services. In order to improve the system even further, the proposed architecture also incorporates a deliberative agent based on defeasible logic that allows for more human-intuitive and effective management of policies. The application of defeasible reasoning is ideal in such environments with incomplete and contradictory information, offering more fl...
Thanos G. Stavropoulos, Efstratios Kontopoulos, Ni