PowerOnt: An Ontology-Based Approach for Power Consumption Estimation in Smart Homes

The impact of electricity consumption in buildings on the overall energy budget of European and North-American states is steadily growing and requires solutions for achieving a more sustainable development. Smart metering and energy management system can be hardly afforded by residential homes, for their cost and the required granularity. Empowering smart homes with suitable power consumption models allows to estimate, in real-time, the current home consumption on the basis of currently active devices. In this paper we introduce an ontology based power consumption model (PowerOnt) for smart homes, and we discuss some application use cases where the proposed approach may successfully be exploited. Results show that the modeling approach has the potential to support energy efficiency measures into residential homes with few or no metering devices.