A Methodology for Applying Decision Policies into Smart Buildings with the use of Computational Argumentation and IoT Technologies

This paper reports on our work for defining a methodology for applying energy and other polices into smart buildings that use Internet of Things enabled devices. The goal is to automate decisions on a variety of issues where there is a conflict of policies between the priorities of different users and roles. We use computational argumentation and a method for compiling meta-policies to automate the decision-making process with the capability to offer human-readable explanations and, at the same time, to achieve increased energy efficiency. IoT sensors take the necessary measurements and data using the KNX standard. To validate our methodology we used an energy related scenario. The case study is applied on a building in the Technical University of Crete, where there are suitable sensors for measuring basic parameters (or data), such as temperature, lighting conditions, motion, and, carbon dioxide levels. The building's energy consumption data is imported by the Open StudiolEnergy plus application. A web-based service for hierarchical argumentation, Gorgias Cloud, is used to process the data and make decisions.