Rule-based approaches for energy savings in an ambient intelligence environment

•A semantic web service middleware provides access to wireless sensors and actuators.•Heterogeneous wireless device networks are deployed at a state university building.•A reactive agent with expert-knowledge and production rules rapidly manages devices.•An alternative, deliberative agent with defeasible logic provides longer-term results.•Energy saving results using both agents in the university deployment are presented.

This paper presents a novel real-world application for energy savings in a Smart Building environment. The proposed system unifies heterogeneous wireless sensor networks under a Semantic Web Service middleware. Two complementary and mutually exclusive rule-based approaches for enforcing energy-saving policies are proposed: a reactive agent based on production rules and a deliberative agent based on defeasible logic. The system was deployed at a Greek University, showing promising experimental results (at least 4% daily savings). Although the percentage of energy savings may seem low, the greatest merit of the method is ensuring that no energy is wasted by constantly enforcing the policies.