EPDL: Supporting Context-Based Energy Control Policy Design in IoT-Enabled Smart Buildings: Programing the Physical World with EPDL

Improving energy efficiency of buildings is an important step towards a more sustainable lifestyle. In the era of Internet of Things (IoT), interconnected smart devices change the application-programming paradigm of buildings. Smart building system and people cloud work in a more collaborative way for improving the energy efficiency. Obtaining fine-grained environmental information and controlling networked remote device are enabled through open web-based services. Writing flexible rules, which can utilize available services to control electricity appliances to act properly based on the acquired context for energy efficiency becomes possible. However, the complexity of a building makes it very complicated for non-expert users write energy control policy without studying the target building in detail. Hence, we proposed a user-friendly energy policy description language, called EPDL and implement a set of components to support the user in writing energy control policy easily for smart buildings. We discussed the readability and writability of EPDL, and showed it is an efficient tool for a non-expert user to write energy control policies for smart buildings.