Smart home reasoning systems: a systematic literature review

A smart home is a residence equipped with technologies that facilitate monitoring of residents, promote independence and increase the quality of life. In general, smart homes are used to control the operations of the home environment and, to automatically adapt it to its inhabitants’ needs. The smart home reasoning system (SHRS) is in charge of determining the automatic control and adaptation operations of the home system. Recently, there has been extensive research concerning different aspects of the SHRS. However, there is a clear lack of systematic investigation targeted at these systems. To close the gap, this paper explores the SHRS domain. For this reason, we applied the systematic literature review (SLR) method by conducting automatic and manual searches on six electronic databases, and in-depth analysis of 135 literature. From the SRL, this paper identifies about 43% of smart homes are designed to provide general home automation services. It also presents twelve major requirements of an SHRS. In addition, the study finds out that 55.5% of the research contributions in SHRS domain are conceptual and, 51.5% of them are based on symbolic artificial intelligence techniques. Further, it characterizes the usage and application trends of different reasoning techniques in smart home domain and, evaluates the major assumptions, strengths, and limitations of the proposed systems in the literature. Additionally, it discusses the challenges of reasoning in ambient assisted living environments. Finally, it underlines in the importance of utilizing hybrid reasoning approaches and the need to handle overlapping, simultaneous and conflicting multiple inhabitants’ activities and goals.