A Semantic-Enabled Social Network of Devices for Building Automation

The progress of building automation devices and networks is curbed by application models with limited device autonomy, static configuration scenarios, and frequent explicit user interaction. This paper presents a novel approach inspired to social network interactions for increased object self-configuration and self-orchestration in home and building automation. Objects become autonomous social agents, interacting and coordinating automatically as new information about the environment is available. The framework is grounded on a service-oriented architecture for encapsulating, exchanging, and composing device capabilities and on semantic-based service description, discovery and aggregation exploiting nonstandard inference services. The proposed approach was implemented in two different testbeds and experimental evaluations of feasibility and performance were carried out with respect to a home automation case study.