Feature Interactions Detection and Resolution in Smart Homes Systems

Smart homes systems (SHS) have become an increasingly important technology in modern life. Typical smart home systems comprise several services and appliances which are deployed in a dynamic environment serving multiple residents. Services may include home security, power management, HVAC (heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning) or entertainment. Each service may include several features which have to be carried out in order for the service to function according to the house residents’ preferences. Each feature is a task to control a single device. In SHS most of devices such as lights, windows and AC’s are shared by several services. What is more, residents vary in their preferences of the services which are provided to them like the preferred room temperature or even the favorite TV show. Such complexity leads sometimes to undesirable interactions between services within the SHS. That is because two or more services which include conflicted features work simultaneously. The interaction occurs when these services have conflicting features or the services work according to conflicted residents’ preferences. The outcome could affect the functionality of the overall system. Several studies have targeted feature interactions detection and resolution in smart homes systems. However, none of these approaches adopts a mechanism of negotiation between such services or residents’ preferences to reach a compromise enabling them to work at the same time. Therefore, this study proposed a flexible Agent-Based Negotiation System (ABNS) of feature interactions detection and resolution in SHS.