A user-centric system architecture for residential energy consumption reduction

Long-term energy consumption reduction can be achieved more readily through sensible cooperation between end users and technological advancements. The DANCER project presented here proposes a user-centric residential energy management system, with the intention to achieve long-term energy related behavioural changes, thus improving the energy efficiency of modern homes. Although, it follows the same basic principles as other contemporary approaches, it focuses on minimizing the interaction of the user with the system. This is achieved through an improved feedback mechanism and a generic, policy based service that takes advantage of the modularity and generality of the software architecture. The proposed system is designed to support a variety of technologies (WiFi, Zigbee, X10), in order to ameliorate the input and output of the decision making operation. In this paper, the general outline of the DANCER system architecture and its most important components are discussed and the prototype test-bed is presented. Special consideration is given to the implementation, operation and response behaviour of the prototype.