A Declarative Goal-oriented Framework for Smart Environments with LPaaS

TL;DR

This work addresses reconciling conflicting user and system administrator goals in smart environments powered by IoT across heterogeneous vendors. It introduces Solomon, a declarative framework for goal mediation, implemented in Prolog and delivered as an LPaaS REST service. The methodology includes a three-stage reasoning process—collecting user requests, mediator resolving conflicts per property instance, and deriving actuator configurations—supported by a zone-based model of sensors, actuators, and property instances. The open-source prototype demonstrates on Smart Home and Smart Building scenarios and offers a flexible, extensible approach for cross-vertical IoT mediation with potential extensions to fuzzy, learning-based policies and Web of Things integration.

Abstract

Smart environments powered by the Internet of Things aim at improving our daily lives by automatically tuning ambient parameters (e.g. temperature, interior light) and by achieving energy savings through self-managing cyber-physical systems. Commercial solutions, however, only permit setting simple target goals on those parameters and do not consider mediating conflicting goals among different users and/or system administrators, and feature limited compatibility across different IoT verticals. In this article, we propose a declarative framework to represent smart environments, user-set goals and customisable mediation policies to reconcile contrasting goals encompassing multiple IoT systems. An open-source Prolog prototype of the framework is showcased over two lifelike motivating examples.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: An example of Smart Building
• Figure 2: Blackbox view of Solomon
• Figure 3: Solomon code.
• Figure 4: findValue/4 implements global policies in the Smart Building.