Concept

Energy consumption at home accounts for one of the most crucial forms of energy spending along with gas utilisation and electricity spending in commercial buildings. According to the American Council for an energy-efficient economy, the residential and commercial sector-homes and buildings- consumes 38.8 percent of the energy used in the US. People use energy to heat and cool buildings to light them and to operate appliances and office machines, while the cost of using such appliances averages more than $1,200 per year.

That is why every time people buy a home appliance, tune up a heating system, or replace a burned-out light bulb they take decisions that affects the environment. Also people may be probably already aware that most of our biggest environmental problems are directly associated with energy generation and use: urban smog, oil spills, acid rain, and global warming, to mention a few, but we may not realize just how big a difference each of us can make by taking energy use into account in our home purchasing and maintenance decisions.

Given the energy waste problem and the consequent need for energy optimal use, the main concept of the project is to foster a harmonised technology for managing in real time the energy consumption of appliances at home, interworking this information to communication devices over the home network and virtualising it with the final aim of making it available to users through home communication networks in the form of standalone or network operator services.

Behind this concept, the main goal is to provide a generalised method for managing the energy consumption of household appliances that are either powered on or in stand-by state.

The project addresses three household appliance types:

White goods (refrigerators, kitchens, washing machines, driers)
Communication devices (cordless phones and gateways for domestic use)
A/V (audiovisual) equipment (TV Sets and Set-top-boxes)

Main benefits of the proposed solution include:

Strengthening of industrial exploitation of energy-aware products, a goal that will create new business opportunities for home appliance manufacturers and network operators
Consolidation of a generalized solution to be massively adopted by residential users and power network operators in order for the first to make optimal energy use and for the second to optimise their energy generation planning and administer efficiently cases of energy over-demand
Offering of incentives to citizens for using the system in order to reduce energy spending and thus minimise costs and energy waste
Implementation of EC policies on energy saving and environment preservation
A generic technology applicable on any appliance type.

Objectives

In order to achieve its goals the project builds on consortium partners experience in the area as well as the results of past research projects, such as the ESTIA project on home media gateways and the COMANCHE project on service creation/execution environments and evolves along the following technological and scientific objectives:

Design and implementation of logic for managing the energy consumption of home appliance intelligently, beyond the simple ON/OFF model
Design and implementation of a generic method for measuring energy consumption of appliances at home
Interfacing to the home network the energy consumption values of three household appliance types
Design and implementation of an energy resources virtualisation environment and appropriate semantics to be used for building energy management applications
Designation and implementation of a methodology addressing energy management of active as well as stand-by appliances
Design and implementation of energy management applications targeting the usability requirements of three (3) user-groups: power distribution network operators, residential users and communication network operators
Enhancement of the ESTIA gateway architecture from a simple communication equipment to an energy-aware management system, with the addition of logic for autonomous energy consumption monitoring and control
Evaluation of the AIM architecture through the involvement of real users
Validation of the functionality of the AIM arhcitecture through a number of evaluation experiments involving applications for three (3) use-cases: Users of the first category will be invited to use the AIM appliances and the platform, all installed in a virtual household environment that will be provided by France Telecom
Evaluation, through the installation of the AIM appliances and platform in real households, of the efficiency of the AIM architecture to reduce energy waste in households