AIM's main objective is to foster a harmonised technology for profiling and managing the energy consumption of appliances at home. AIM will introduce energy monitoring and management mechanisms in the home network and will provide a proper service creation environment to serve virtualisation of energy consumption, with the final aim of offering users a number of standalone and operator services.

Behind this goal, the main idea is to forge a generalised method for managing the power consumption of devices that are either powered on or in stand-by state. Especially for the second category of devices, the project will define intelligent mechanisms for stand-by state detection, using all-device-fit control interfaces.

The AIM technology will be applied on white goods (refrigerators, kitchens, washing machines, driers), communication devices (cordless phones and wireless communication devices for domestic use) and audiovisual equipment (TV Sets and Set-top-boxes) and will be built around three use-cases:

1. Use-case for residential users (intelligent power management service for autonomous energy preservation).
2. Use-case for power distribution network operators (metering service for energy planning).
3. Use-case for network operators (remote monitoring and management).

To enable wider applicability of its technology, AIM will also consider, in the specification phase, the energy management requirements of peripheral household devices, such as heaters, solar panels, etc, of which use is less frequent but also important concerning energy consumption. The AIM technology will be evaluated in the context of experiments that will be hosted, initially in virtual home environment and latter in real households. Experiments will have the objective of acquiring real users' experience with regard to the usefulness of AIM applications and to prove the efficiency of the solution in saving energy, 10% for stand-by devices and 20% for active devices.