An agent-based infrastructure for energy profile capture and management

Accurately monitoring changing energy usage patterns in households is a first requirement for more efficient and eco-friendly energy management. Such data is essential to the establishment of the Smart Grid, but at this stage, domestic data collection devices are still in development and monitoring-enabled domestic appliances are rare, so that any experimental software framework must be flexible and adaptable both in respect of sensor sources and developer and user requirements. These considerations have been the drivers behind the distributed agent-based platform this paper proposes. It provides: (i) a generic sensor interface that can be specialised for new devices as required, while insulating the rest of the platform from such changes, (ii) persistent unstructured (RDF) data storage, permitting both semantic annotation and semantic-based queries, independent of data sources, and (iii) a flexible, dynamic browser interface, that allows for remote configuration of the sensor platform and accessibility via a wide range of devices. Two small case studies show the utility of the approach.