Received: 8 May 2019 Revised: 16 August 2019
DOI: 10.1111/coin.12252
SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE
IntelliHome: An internet of things-based
system for electrical energy saving in smart
home environment
Mario A. Paredes-Valverde1 Giner Alor-Hernández1
Jorge L. García-Alcaráz2 María del Pilar Salas-Zárate1
Luis O. Colombo-Mendoza1 José L. Sánchez-Cervantes1
1
Tecnológico Nacional de México/ I. T.
Orizaba, Orizaba, Mexico
2
Department of Industrial Engineering
and Manufacturing, Autonomous
University of Ciudad Juárez, Ciudad
Juárez, Mexico
Correspondence
Giner Alor-Hernández, I. T. Orizaba, Ave.
Oriente 9 No. 852, Col. Emiliano Zapata,
Orizaba, Veracruz, Mexico 94320.
Email: galor@ito-depi.edu.mx
Funding information
Secretariat of Public Education (SEP);
Mexico's National Council of Science and
Technology (CONACYT); National
Technological Institute of Mexico
(Tecnológico Nacional de Mexico, TecNM)
Computational Intelligence. 2019;1–22. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/coin
Accepted: 28 September 2019
Abstract
Despite there has been an increasing energy price due to
factors such as supply, demand, government regulation,
among others, users do not like to spend their time to
analyze their power consumption and establish actions
to save money. Hence, there is a need for smart solu-
tions that help users to save energy at home in an easy
way. The smart home concept is attracting the atten-
tion of both academia and industry to address this need.
Nowadays, high volumes of data are available in the
smart home context, facilitated by the growth of inter-
net of things (IoT)-based devices and advanced sensing
infrastructure. Therefore, it is necessary to automati-
cally extract useful knowledge from this information
to cost-effective use of energy at home. In this sense,
this work presents IntelliHome, a smart-home system
that aims to reduce electrical energy consumption at
home. To this end, IntelliHome uses big data analytics
technologies and Machine Learning and statistical tech-
niques to provide users with a meaningful perspective of
their electricity consumption habits aiming to actively
involve them in the energy-saving process through
real-time information and energy-saving recommenda-
tions. This work also discusses a case study and an
evaluation aligned with the objectives of this work.
© 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1
2 PAREDES-VALVERDE et al.

The obtained results verify the effectiveness of the pro-

posed system regarding electrical energy saving.

KEYWORDS
big data analytics, energy saving, internet of things, smart home

1 I N T RO DU CT ION

In the last years, there has been an increasing energy price due to several factors such as sup-
ply, demand, weather forecasts, global markets, government regulation, among others. Despite
this fact, generally, users do not like to spend their time to analyze their power consumption
and schedule home appliances to save money.1 For instance, in the United States, at least 30% of
the energy consumed by residential and commercial consumers is wasted.2 These facts motivate
researchers and power industry to focus on developing smart solutions that help users to mon-
itor, control, and save energy at home, as well as to find alternative energy sources such as sun
and wind.3,4
The smart home has proved to be beneficial in people’s real lives. A smart home is a house
or living environment that contains the technology to allow devices and systems to be controlled
automatically.5 Originally, smart home technologies were used to control indoor systems such as
lighting and heating, however, in the last years, almost any electrical component at the home can
be controlled. Considering that residential buildings represent a big part of the global energy used,
smart home technologies have focused on enhancing domestic comfort, convenience, security,
and leisure while reducing energy use by means of optimized home energy management.6
The internet of things (IoT) is a technological revolution that represents the future of com-
puting and communications.7 Nowadays, high volumes of data are available in the smart home
context, facilitated by the growth of IoT-based devices and advanced sensing infrastructure.
These data represent an unprecedented opportunity to discover users’ behavior patterns at home.
Therefore, it is necessary to automatically extract useful knowledge from this information to
cost-effective use of energy at home. In this sense, big data analytics technologies can be used to
collect and analyze large amounts of data.8 Specifically, such technologies allows large volumes
of data generated by using electronic sensors and users’ demands to be coordinated, analyzed,
and effectively used.9
In the context of IoT-based smart homes, in which energy consumption data can be col-
lected as time series data, energy usage optimization problems can be interpreted as time
series forecasting problems. Some statistical techniques, for example, the exponential smooth-
ing method and the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model, have been
traditionally used to solve this type of problems. Nonetheless, over the last decade, artificial
intelligence (AI)-based techniques, specifically, machine learning (ML)-based techniques, have
gained considerable prominence in the academic literature as alternatives to statistical ones for
time series forecasting.10 Among the most popular AI-based techniques for time series fore-
casting are: (i) artificial neural networks (ANNs); (ii) support vector machines algorithm; (iii)
K-nearest neighbors algorithm; (iv) grey system theory-based models, nature-inspired meta-
heuristic algorithms and fuzzy models,11 especially, those that belong to the family of Fuzzy
Rule-Based Systems such as Takagi-Sugeno Fuzzy model12 (soft computing approaches); (v)
ensemble learning methods,13 such as random decision forest-based methods.14 Furthermore,
PAREDES-VALVERDE et al. 3

among the most typical nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms to time series forecasting are
evolutionary algorithms such as genetic algorithms and swarm intelligence algorithms, such as
Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm and Ant Colony Optimization algorithm.15
Nowadays, there are many efforts to provide energy management solutions in smart homes.
However, some approaches sacrifice human comfort aiming to obtain better results.16 Thus, an
important research direction is to develop innovative technological solutions that allow users
to cost-effective use of energy while their comfort at home is preserved. The primary contribu-
tion of this work is therefore to present IntelliHome, a smart-home system that aims to provide
efficient consumption of electrical energy in a domestic environment but not affecting users’
comfort at home. By using technologies such as smart plugs, this system goes beyond traditional
control of air conditioners and smart water heaters and incorporates a wider variety of home
appliances.
Furthermore, unlike some of the smart home systems for energy management and control
reported in the literature, IntelliHome considers users as key actors of the energy-saving process,
enabling the discovery of patterns in users’ behavior data. Specifically, IntelliHome is empow-
ered with Big data analytics technologies and ML techniques that allow extracting deeper insights
from data collected from the IoT-based smart home network not only in the form of energy con-
sumption patterns but also in the form of users’ behavior patterns, as well as to provide users with
a meaningful perspective of energy consumption using reports and charts.
This system is finally able to provide energy-saving recommendations at the appliance level by
incorporating not only descriptive analytics techniques but also predictive analytics techniques.
These recommendations are specifically generated by a prediction model that is built from the
energy usage forecasts of a hybrid statistical and ML-based time series forecasting method and
the patterns discovered. IntelliHome also provides a Web application and a mobile application
that allow users to monitor, control and save electrical energy through tasks such as turn on/off
appliances, schedule home appliances operation, obtain electrical energy consumption historical
data, among others.
During the past decade, hybrid statistical and ML-based methods have been studied for time
series forecasting.17-19 These are receiving increased attention as researchers at transportation
network companies such as Uber Technologies, Inc. are betting on them to solve various fore-
casting problems across different use cases. In this context, we studied the applicability of the
hybrid time series forecasting method by Smyl,20 a Data Scientist at Uber Technologies, Inc., to
the case of our energy usage forecasting problem; this method was submitted to the 2018 edition
of the popular open forecasting competition known as M (Makridakis) Competition,21 demon-
strating an impressive accuracy that gave it victory. This method takes advantage of the non-linear
modeling capabilities of ANNs, specifically, Recurrent Neural Networks, while takes advantage
of the Triple Exponential Smoothing method (Holt-Winters Exponential Smoothing method) to
effectively deal with seasonality as part of the forecasting process and to add local parameters
(smoothing coefficients) that provide ANNs the time series specificity that they often lack. The
results of an analysis of the error in the forecasts of this method with respect to some baseline
methods allowed us to corroborate the superiority of its performance for our dataset. The findings
of a case study on the use of IntelliHome in a real-life scenario over a 10-month period actually
indicated that power consumption in a typical residential dwelling block can be progressively
reduced with the active role of inhabitants as users.
Although this work is in part focused on the use of ANNs for time series forecasting, it
can be of interest to researchers from other fields of AI who share our motivation. In this con-
text, the development of optimization methods that use nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms
4 PAREDES-VALVERDE et al.

such as genetic algorithms for hybrid energy demand forecasting approaches represents an
interesting future research direction for Evolutionary Computation researchers.22-24 Assuming
the potentially wide applicability of the time series forecasting method and the ML methods for
Big data analytics that are behind the recommendations generated by IntelliHome, the results of
this study may be reasonably extrapolated to the domains of smart cities and smart grids, which
increases its potential impact and interestingness among researchers from the corresponding
research areas.25-28
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: Section 2 describes the relevant litera-
ture on energy management systems for smart homes. Then, Section 3 describes the functional
architecture of IntelliHome, highlighting those components aiming to optimize electrical energy
consumption. Section 4 presents a case study that describes the use of IntelliHome in a real-life
scenario as well as the quantitative results on electrical energy use at home. Then, Section 5
presents an evaluation of the performance of the time series forecasting method that is behind
the energy-saving recommendations generated by IntelliHome with respect to some baseline
methods. Finally, Section 6 discusses the research conclusions and future directions.

2 RELATED WORK

In the last years, different energy consumption management systems have been developed to facil-
itate effective use of energy by consumers.29,30 This related literature, which goes beyond systems
that employ time series forecasting methods, was analyzed in this work for the sake of compre-
hensiveness. Related works were classified into two main groups according to the methods that
they employ: methods based on mathematical techniques and methods based on IoT technolo-
gies. Likewise, we analyzed some current and past review works on intelligent systems based on
IoT technologies and Big Data analytics techniques for energy consumption management and
control.
Regarding the first group, Shakier et al16 presented a real-time algorithm that selects the suit-
able energy source (grid or battery) for each home appliance to operate based on the electricity
price, the power required to operate, and the maximum limitation power of draining the bat-
tery. Chen et al31 presented a cyber-physical model that combines user’s information on social
networks with user’s location information to infer users’ demands in smart homes and generate
scheduling strategies of home appliances to optimally manage the energy consumption preserv-
ing users’ comfort at home. Zhang et al32 developed a mechanism to regulate energy loads of home
heating, ventilation, and air conditioner. This mechanism combines machine learning, optimiza-
tion, and data structure design technologies to generate demand response policies and capture
home appliances behavior. On the other hand, Rastegar et al33 proposed a method for home
energy management that prioritizes the operation of controllable appliances from the user’s view-
point. In this sense, the authors defined the value of lost load (VOLL) of each appliance to indicate
the operation priority of that appliance from the user’s viewpoint aiming to minimize customer
energy and reliability costs. Abrishambaf et al34 presented an incentive-based demand response
program of a home energy management system that allows controlling the electricity consump-
tion at home. The program is evaluated in different scenarios that involved typical Portuguese
homes obtaining encouraging results. Anvari-Moghaddam et al35 developed a multiobjective
mixed integer nonlinear programming model for optimal energy use at home. This model consid-
ers a balance between domestic energy consumption and users’ comfort by means of an optimal
task scheduling and a thermal comfort zone. Amini et al36 proposed a mixed integer linear
PAREDES-VALVERDE et al. 5

programming (MILP)-based system that aims to minimize residential electricity cost by shifting
demand over a daily forecast price cycle. This system optimizes home appliances operation based
on the appliances use-time patterns. Finally, Althaher et al37 presented an optimization-based
home energy management system that controls appliances in response to dynamic price signals.
This system aims to reduce the home electricity costs while daily volume of curtailed energy is
minimized as well as user’s comfort level is preserved.
With respect to IoT-based approaches, Geng et al2 proposed an IoT-based model for home
energy management that aims to find an optimal scheduling scheme of home appliances. The
model adopts a time interval optimization strategy to find an optimal scheme and uses radio fre-
quency technology to achieve fully automatic control of appliances. Al-Ali et al8 presented an
IoT-based energy management system for smart homes. This system uses off-the-self business
intelligence and big data analytics to process and analyze data collected from home devices and
manage energy consumption and meet consumer demand. Aburukba et al38 presented a con-
ceptual model that allows users to define rules and objectives concerning energy use planning.
In this way, when a house exceeds the energy consumption limit per day, the system notifies
user and provide recommendations on home appliances usage. On the other hand, Khan et al39
presented a ZigBee-based smart home control system that integrates an energy control mod-
ule and an electronic appliances control module. The first module integrates sunlight with light
sources to control unnecessary energy demands. The second module controls the operating time
of home appliances. Lee et al40 proposed a smart energy management gateway that allow monitor-
ing and managing Iotivity-compatible devices aiming to avoid unnecessary energy consumption.
Iotivity is an open source IoT platform developed by Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC) that
allows device discovering and management, and data transmission and management. Finally,
Iqbal et al41 proposed an IoT-based architecture for smart homes focused on controlling electrical
energy consumption. This architecture uses a load balancing approach for better usage of electri-
cal appliances. For this purpose, implements a Hadoop ecosystem to process data collected from
the wireless sensor network (WSN) in real-time.
From the discussion of the role of IoT in transforming traditional electric power and energy
systems (EPEs), an extensive review of IoT-based EPEs, including an analysis of their economic,
social and environmental impact, was presented in Reference 42. Authors finally outlined some
possible solutions for the most common challenges faced in the deployment of IoT for EPEs, high-
lighting the role of big data technologies as a solution to the challenges related to the difficulty to
store, track, analyze, visualize and interpret the generated data. In Reference 15, a comprehensive
review of the existing works on ML techniques for forecasting energy consumption time series,
which resulted in the identification of the most popular techniques, including those based on the
hybrid statistical and ML-based approach and ANNs as pure ML techniques, was presented. An
in-depth analysis of the hybrid approach, which revealed that ANNs and evolutionary algorithms
are the types of ML techniques that are most frequently combined, was also provided. Jiang et al43
gave an overview of the recent research and development on the application of big data technolo-
gies in the domain of energy, and they proposed an integrated big data analytics architecture for
the smart grid subdomain. In this architecture, a state-of-the-art prediction algorithm is used to
estimate energy demand and supply. A discussion on the key application directions of energy big
data that focuses on various branches of the area of renewable energy, such as marine energy and
wind energy, is also provided by authors. A review of studies on IoT-based intelligent energy con-
trol in buildings for smart cities was presented in Reference 44. In that review, the studies analyzed
were organized according to the design of a novel layered IoT architecture that comprises a soft-
ware platform component and a hardware infrastructure component; in particular, the software
6 PAREDES-VALVERDE et al.

platform component is based on the service-oriented architectural pattern and is intended to

provide support for abstraction of objects or “things” and for management and composition of IoT
services. A summary of the key challenges faced in the studies analyzed, of which those related
to the availability and reliability of the IoT services are two of the most critical challenges for the
domain of energy, was finally provided.
According to the literature discussion presented in this section, we can propose the following
three conclusions: (i) Some smart home energy management systems reported in the literature
does not consider the user’s behavior patterns to provide energy-saving recommendations. To
address this limitation, IntelliHome collects data from an IoT-based home area network, which is
also part of the system here proposed. The data collected contain information about ambient con-
ditions and user’s behavior that allow IntelliHome to identify energy consumption patterns and
define potential actions that can help users to reduce energy consumption while their preferences
concerning ambient conditions and home appliances usage are preserved; (ii) there are several
studies that are only focused on controlling air conditioner or water heater to reduce energy con-
sumption. To address this limitation, IntelliHome combines technologies such as smart plugs that
allow the system to control and monitor the energy consumption of other appliances available
at home such as lights, TVs, refrigerator, among others; (iii) some approaches do not consider
users as a key element within the energy-saving context. In this sense, IntelliHome uses big data
analytics techniques to provide users with a meaningful perspective of their electrical energy con-
sumption habits aiming to actively involve them in the energy-saving process through real-time
information and recommendations; and (iv) unlike our proposal, most of the smart home systems
that incorporate electricity consumption forecasting do not rely on predictive analytics techniques
to provide energy-saving recommendations to users and are limited to predict electricity usage
and perform automatic control actions.

3 INTELLIHOME: ARCHITECTURE AND

FUNCTIONALITY

IntelliHome is a smart-home system for electrical energy saving based on IoT and Big data tech-
nologies. This system collects electrical energy consumption and user’s behavior data from a
home area network consisting of IoT-based smart devices such as home appliances, smart plugs,
sensors, among others. All information collected is processed and analyzed through big data ana-
lytics techniques to provide users with a meaningful perspective of electrical energy consumption
at home that allows them to better manage home appliances operation without affecting their
comfort at home.

3.1 Architecture description

IntelliHome relies on a layered functional architecture that allows clearly define and dis-
tribute tasks and responsibilities of each module. This feature ensures an easy maintenance
and a high-level of scalability. Figure 1 depicts the general architecture of IntelliHome,
which comprises four main layers: the presentation layer, the home area network, the home
energy consumption monitor (HECM), and the data management layer. Each layer in turn
comprises several elements with specific functions and relations. These layers are briefly
described below.
PAREDES-VALVERDE et al. 7

• Presentation layer. This layer ensures the communication between the user and the system.
To this end, this layer provides a Web application and a mobile application through which
users can easily perform tasks such as turn on/off smart appliances, monitor electrical energy
consumption, obtain electrical energy consumption historical data, schedule appliances, lower
the air conditioner’s temperature, among others.
• Home area network. The home area network consists of different IoT-based devices such as
home appliances and sensors having communication interfaces that facilitate the exchange
of information. These devices allow collecting information about the home appliances status,
appliances electrical energy consumption, room ambient conditions (temperature, humidity,
and natural lighting), users’ behavior, among others. All data collected is send to the home
energy consumption monitoring module controller for further processing and analysis.
• Home energy consumption monitor (HECM). This module processes and analyses all data
collected from the home area network by using big data analytics techniques to detect users’
behavior patterns at home emphasizing ambient conditions, user presence, and home appli-
ances operation. The main goal of this module is to allow users to monitor and control home
appliances to reduce electrical energy consumption. To this end, the HECM component pro-
vides users with information about electrical energy consumption habits and suggests appli-
ances control decisions. Finally, this module is able to send control actions to the appliances
to reduce their energy consumption.
• Data management layer. This layer uses Big data-based data storage technologies to provide
simplified management of all data collected from the home area network such as home appli-
ance information, room ambient conditions, among others, as well as analytical results data.
Regarding data security, all data access commands are encapsulated by this layer. Finally, it
must be mentioned that this module is based on the open-source software framework Apache
Hadoop.45

The following subsections thoroughly describe the most representative IntelliHome’s compo-
nents for the purposes of this work.

F I G U R E 1 General
architecture of IntelliHome
8 PAREDES-VALVERDE et al.

3.2 Home area network

Aiming to obtain an effective home electrical energy saving system, it is important to consider
energy consumption behavior and users’ requirements to achieve optimal control of home appli-
ances operation. On the one hand, home energy consumption behavior depends on multiple
factors such as weather conditions, natural ventilation, air conditioner system, number of occu-
pants, the age of occupants, occupants’ behavior, design architecture, season, to mention but a
few. On the other hand, occupants’ requirements in the smart home include hot water, indoor air
cooling or heating, lighting levels, and so on, which are completely related to the energy demand
and consumption.
Considering the above mentioned, it is needed a reliable communication network that can
allow IntelliHome to collect electrical energy consumption and user’s behavior data to encourage
energy saving. Therefore, IntelliHome implements a ZigBee-based home area network that allows
users to intelligently and efficiently control home appliances. Zigbee is a wireless standard for data
transmission that allows the machine to machine (M2M) communication. The main goal of this
network is to collect data from different IoT-based devices connected to it. These data comprise
information about electrical appliances status, electrical appliances power consumption, room
temperature, air-conditioner temperature, users’ presence, among other things. Specifically, the
IoT-based devices that integrate the home area network can be divided into four main categories:

• Smart home appliances. Home appliances are responsible for an important part of the energy
bills. Some of these home appliances are dishwashers, electric stoves, refrigerators, air condi-
tioners, among others. In the context of IntelliHome, home appliances are classified according
to their energy usage natures. This classification is based on the home appliances categories
defined in Reference 33. Specifically, the home appliances categories defined in this work are:
⚬ Uncontrollable appliances. This category refers to those home appliances that do not have a
programmable operation time and whose interruption causes a great impact on users’ lives
at home. For example, the refrigerator is an uninterruptible home appliance since some
foods require storage in a refrigerator not only to keep the food fresher for longer, but also as
a way to slow down the spread of germs that could make the food unsafe for users. This cat-
egory also groups those home appliances that are used when needed, for example, personal
computers, stoves, among others.
⚬ Controllable appliances. This category refers to those home appliances whose interruption
hardly affects users’ lives at home. The controllable appliances can be further divided into
next groups:
▪ Scheduled appliances. This category includes home appliances whose operation can be
scheduled according to the users’ behavior patterns3. For instance, the coffee maker
could be programmed to have the coffee ready at a specific time.
▪ On/Off controlled appliances. This kind of home appliances refers to devices that can
be controlled in on/off manner, that is, appliances whose operation can be interrupted
according to specific conditions at home. For instance, lights can be turned off when the
system does not detect the presence of a user at a room.
• Sensor Network. The system integrates a set of dispersed and dedicated sensors for monitor-
ing and recording the physical conditions at the home environment. Specifically, the sensor
network is composed of devices that allow measuring room’s temperature, humidity, and ambi-
ent light intensity, as well as to know the opening and closing of doors and windows, and user’s
PAREDES-VALVERDE et al. 9

presence at home and him/her localization in a specific room. All these data allow the system
to discover users’ behavior patterns at home.
• Smart plugs. This kind of devices measures the electrical energy consumption of home appli-
ances and send this information to the home energy consumption monitoring module. Also,
these devices are able to receive instructions from the home energy consumption monitoring
module to turn on/off home appliances. The use of smart plugs helps users to understand the
contribution of each home appliance on the saving electricity costs achieved by IntelliHome.
• Home gateway. This device collects, stores, and transmit data collected from all devices con-
nected to the home area network. This component works as a common interface between
devices connected to the network and external networks. In this way, home appliances can be
locally or remotely controlled.

3.3 Home energy consumption monitor

The HECM was implemented by using free open source tools. Specifically, it uses Apache
Mahout,45,46 a library of scalable machine-learning algorithms, DyNet,47 a dynamic neural net-
work library mainly developed by Carnegie Mellon University, and R,48 a programming language
and free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. The HECM modules uses
such big data analytics technologies to analyze large amounts of data collected by the home area
network and detect energy consumption patterns. The detection of these patterns allows defining
energy-saving recommendations at home appliance level. Figure 2 depicts the general workflow
of the HECM component implemented by IntelliHome. As can be observed, big data technologies
play an important role in energy saving decisions since they allow providing users with energy
consumption and behavior patterns information in the form of graphs and reports. In this way,
users are aware of their energy consumption behavior and can adjust and optimize their power
consumption through recommendations provided by the system.
All data collected by IntelliHome is classified based on the room’s temperature, power
consumption per appliance, power consumption per day, home appliances use patterns, and
user’s presence patterns (including user’s presence in the house rooms). Specifically, the
functional requirements of this module are:

FIGURE 2 General workflow of the home energy consumption monitor implemented by IntelliHome
10 PAREDES-VALVERDE et al.

• Energy consumption analysis. User can visualize the consumption of each room as well as
of the aggregated consumption of the entire smart home. Moreover, users are provided with
information about energy consumption patterns in the form of graphs and reports; the HECM
module implements a two-phase method to discover these patterns. The first phase of this
method consists in using simple aggregation methods for data analytics, namely, summation,
averaging and grouping. In the second phase, the cluster analysis technique with the K-means
algorithm is employed to classify houses based on energy efficiency over time, allowing users
to observe the energy consumption patterns on the classification. We followed the approach
by Hussain49 to classify buildings in four classes: high-efficiency, moderate efficiency, low effi-
ciency and poor efficiency so the number of clusters required (K) was set to 4. The HECM
module obtains the energy consumption per day based on the home appliances classification
presented in the previous section, that is, the home energy consumption is the sum of energy
consumption of controllable and uncontrollable appliances. With this regard, the time of start
and duration of home appliances such as TV, microwave and coffee maker are totally random
since their operation depends on the occupants’ behavior. Therefore, the energy consumption
of this kind of devices is collected by the smart plug. Finally, when a house is exceeding the con-
sumption of energy per day, the system provides users with recommendations on appliances
usage.
• Room ambient conditions. It provides information about the ambient conditions of each room,
that is, data about the temperature, humidity and natural lighting. According to Rupp et al,50
human thermal comfort in the built environment is between 18◦ C and 24◦ C and the optimum
temperature is 21◦ C. In this sense, the HECM module can adjust the air-conditioner tempera-
ture until the room temperatures reach 21◦ C or turn on/off the air conditioner in order to keep
the temperature of the house within the aforementioned range.
• User behavior patterns analysis. Thanks to all above mentioned requirements, the HECM mod-
ule is able to identify user behavior patterns within the house rooms based on the room’s
ambient conditions and user’s presence. The aforementioned two-phase pattern discovery
method is used also to discover this type of patterns. In this case, users are provided with
information about the use of home appliances and lights. Sometimes, the operation of some
appliances is not critical for the users’ daily activities, therefore, their operation can be post-
poned or cancelled. However, to find an optimal scheduling scheme of home appliances
represents a considerable challenge for residential users.2 In this sense, the HECM module
infers users’ demands for electricity and schedule the operation of home appliances based on
all data collected through the home area network. In this way, IntelliHome enables users to
reduce home energy consumption cost.
• Energy-saving recommendations. The HECM module is finally able to provide energy-saving
recommendations to users using a prediction model that is built from energy usage fore-
casts and both the energy consumption patterns and the users’ behavior patterns. The energy
usage predictions are made by the HECM module based on historical energy consumption
data using a hybrid statistical and Machine Learning-based time series forecasting method.
In particular, we implemented the time series forecasting method proposed by Smyl,51 a
Data Scientist at Uber Technologies, in the context of the M4 (Makridakis 4) Forecasting
Competition.21 This method, which was the winner of the competition, is a combination of
the Triple Exponential Smoothing method (also called Holt-Winters Exponential Smoothing
method52 ) and a recurrent neural network (RNN) model. On the one hand, the Triple Exponen-
tial Smoothing method is a method of the family of statistical methods for univariate time series
PAREDES-VALVERDE et al. 11

forecasting known as Exponential Smoothing, which explicitly adds support for seasonality
to the univariate data. On the other hand, an RNN is a class of deep artificial neural net-
work in which connections between nodes form a directed graph along a temporal sequence.
The architecture design in which our implementation of the Holt-Winters-RNN method relies
consists of a linear adapter on top of a neural architecture. The linear adapter in turn con-
sists of a component of neural network weights and a component of exponential smoothing
coefficients, whereas the neural architecture comprises one single block of four dilated Long
Short-Term Memory units connected through residual shortcuts similar to the ones proposed in
Reference 53.

In summary, the HECM module allows users to monitor and control the energy consumption
of electrical home appliances. As explained in this section, the control of appliances is achieved
through a set of energy-saving recommendations at home appliances level, which considers the
user’s behavior patterns.

3.4 Presentation layer: mobile application

IntelliHome provides a mobile application that allow users to interact with the platform.
Figure 3A shows the main mobile interface which contains a menu with all available options
such as monitor home appliances, register a house’s room, add a smart device to a specific room,
get energy consumption information, and to obtain energy-saving recommendations. As was
mentioned, the mobile application provides energy consumption information in the form of
reports and charts (see Figure 3B). This information help users to gain significant insights on
electrical energy consumption at home. Therefore, users, being aware of their energy consump-
tion behavior, can adjust and optimize the use of home appliances to reduce their electricity bills.

(A) (B) (C)

FIGURE 3 Main mobile user interfaces of IntelliHome

12 PAREDES-VALVERDE et al.

On the other hand, Figure 3C depicts some energy saving recommendations whose main goal is
to convince users to voluntarily change some daily energy consumption patterns.
Thanks to the use of IoT technologies, IntelliHome allows users to remotely control home
appliances. In this sense, the mobile application also provides a set of user interfaces that allow
users to turn on/off appliances as well as schedule their operation aiming to reduce electrical
energy consumption. Furthermore, thanks to remote access feature, users could always know the
opening and closing of doors and windows to ensure the safety of housing and property.

4 C A S E ST U DY

This section presents a case study to illustrate how the IntelliHome system works in two differ-
ent single-family homes configurations with different controllable and uncontrollable appliances.
The main goal of this case study is to obtain electrical energy consumption under typical circum-
stances and compare these data with the final results obtained in a scenario where IntelliHome
is used. The following subsections discuss the information used in this study as well as the
evaluation results.

4.1 Methodology

The case study was developed in a residential housing complex containing 20 units. This com-
plex contains two different types of house. Table 1 presents an average configuration of the rooms
and the appliances available in them of all houses considered in this work. As we can see, the
second type of house is bigger than the first one. Specifically, it is composed of one more bed-
room. Regarding the number of residents, the first type is inhabited by an average of three people,
meanwhile, the second type is inhabited by an average of four people.
In addition to the devices described in Table 1, each house used in this study has at least two
smart plugs installed to record electricity consumption. Furthermore, each house has sensors
for monitoring and recording room’s temperature, ambient light intensity, and user’s presence at
home and him/her localization in a specific room. These devices collect and send information
to the data management layer at 30-seconds intervals, which results in 2880 measurement data
every day.

T A B L E 1 Average configuration of houses considered in the case study

House 1 House 2
Living room One television, one air conditioner, and One television, one air conditioner, one video
two lights game console, and two lights
Dinner room Two lights Two lights
Kitchen One refrigerator, one oven, one One refrigerator, one dishwasher, one oven, one
microwave, and two lights microwave, and two lights
Bedroom 1 One television, two lamps, and one light One television, two lamps, and one light
Bedroom 2 One television, one light One television, one light
Bedroom 3 Two lights
PAREDES-VALVERDE et al. 13

For the purposes of this case study, it was necessary to obtain information about the
energy consumption before and after IntelliHome’s implementation. To this end, we follow next
methodology:

1. Ten-month (mid-March 2017 to mid-January 2018) information about the energy consump-
tion of each house was collected. To this end, we use the electric bills provided by the Mexico’s
CFE (Federal Electricity Commission). In this scenario, occupants use electrical appliances
without the support of IntelliHome, that is, users do daily activities without care about energy
consumption. Furthermore, their comfort is the highest priority. For the purposes of fore-
casting energy consumption time series in this case study, a 10-month synthetic dataset was
generated based on this information, with which the Holt-Winters-RNN method was trained
and tested before the IntelliHome’s implementation.
2. IntelliHome’s implementation. The proposed system was implemented in all houses. The end
users group received a description of the mobile application provided by the system. This
description consisted of explaining all available options for controlling home appliances and
monitoring electrical energy consumption.
3. Once IntelliHome was introduced, users were asked to use the mobile application during the
mid-March 2018 to mid-January 2019 period. A final fitted Holt-Winters-RNN model was used
by IntelliHome to predict time series values using a time window of previous 30 days. Along
this period, IntelliHome therefore provided users with a set of recommendations about home
appliances usage. It must be remembered that when a recommendation is accepted, the system
performed actions to control and scheduling home appliances operation.
4. A dataset consisting of energy consumption information of all considered houses was col-
lected by using the home area network that is part of IntelliHome. This dataset corresponds
to the abovementioned period and collects information on home appliances usage and user’s
behavior at home.
5. The dataset collected was analyzed by means of big data analytics technologies to identify
energy consumption patterns regarding home appliances usage and user’s behavior.
6. In order to determine whether the use of the proposed system help to reduce energy consump-
tion, energy consumption information of mid-March 2017 to mid-January 2018 was compared
to the energy consumption information corresponding to the mid-March 2018 to mid-January
2019 period. The information about the energy consumption of the second period was also
collected through the electric bills provide by the Mexico’s CFE.

Finally, it must be remarked that IntelliHome focuses only on reducing the electrical energy
consumption of the home appliances described in Table 1.

4.2 Results

Big data technologies enable IntelliHome to extract deeper insights from data collected from the
smart home network aiming to provide users with a meaningful perspective of energy consump-
tion. In this case study, we analyze dataset collected aiming to understand energy consumption
patterns and the factors that influence them, as well as to identify potential actions that can help
users to reduce energy consumption. In the remainder of this section, the results and observations
obtained from this case study are discussed.
14 PAREDES-VALVERDE et al.

4.2.1 Dataset analysis

The dataset collected was analyzed to identify energy consumption patterns related to room ambi-
ent conditions (temperature and lighting) and user’s localization in house rooms. To this end,
we analyze short periods (1 day), medium periods (a week), and long periods (1 month) to obtain
overall trends. However, once an exploratory analysis of the dataset collected was performed,
we noted that it presented some inconsistencies regarding electrical energy consumption values
per home appliance. For instance, the consumption values of some hours in a day were not col-
lected by the home area network. To address these inconsistencies, we implemented the average
aggregation technique, which allowed calculating an average of the original series values and
converts it to a lower frequency. This technique has been successfully used in wireless sensor
networks.54-56 Next, the observations extracted from the dataset are discussed. Furthermore, we
reshaped data to form continuous time series, so we filled with zeros the daily consumption val-
ues that were missing for the appliances that are not used daily, for example, dishwasher and
video game console.
First, we analyze the relationship between energy consumption and room ambient condi-
tions, specifically, the room’s temperature. We noted that energy consumed by the air conditioner,
which is mainly used for cooling, accounts between 13% and 21% of the total energy used in each
house. Second, we analyze the relationship between energy consumption and the user’s presence
at home. From this analysis, we noted that during the first months, most users carried out their
activities without care about energy consumption. For instance, they kept the air conditioner on,
even when there was nobody in the living room. This situation occurred also for the lights. Finally,
we also detected those houses that consume more energy when users are not present at home.
With this regard, we noted that this fact mainly happens in houses where there are kids. In fact,
these houses were mostly classified into low efficiency and as poor efficiency classes as a result
of the cluster analysis performed as part of the pattern discovery process. On the other hand, we
also observed that only one house has an energy consumption that is not proportional to the num-
ber of inhabitants. It is probably due to the fact that occupation rate and air conditioner usage is
highest than in the other houses.
With regard to the energy consumption patterns themselves, we analyzed both daily consump-
tion patterns and seasonal consumption patterns. In the first case, we could observe that daily
electricity consumption of houses was higher in the afternoon and at night, which can be inter-
preted as an indication that the buildings are actually houses and not office buildings, for example.
Moreover, we observed that certain information about daily consumption values such as the day
of week and even the hour of day can be strong energy demand predictors. In the second case, we
could observe a seasonal variation in the use of electricity, which is an obvious phenomenon; in
this context, energy consumed for heating and cooling respectively increased during winter and
summer, as expected; we also discovered an interesting trend regarding the energy demand of
video game consoles in houses of type 2 in summer, which can be attributed to the school summer
break.
On the other hand, the analysis performed on the dataset also helped us to identify a set
of recommendations that can contribute to the energy consumption reduction of residential
dwellings. We put special attention on the air conditioner and lighting use which, according
to Mexico’s Ministry of Energy (SENER), represent one of the two greatest potential energy
savings.
PAREDES-VALVERDE et al. 15

T A B L E 2 Comparison results
Not using Using kWh
IntelliHome IntelliHome saved % saved
(avg) (avg) (avg) (avg)
mid-March to mid-May 589 kWh 542 kWh 47 kWh 7.97
mid-May to mid-July 657 kWh 585 kWh 72 kWh 10.95
mid-July to mid-September 640 kWh 551 kWh 89 kWh 13.9
mid-September to 511 kWh 465 kWh 46 kWh 9.00
mid-November
mid-November to 399 kWh 359 kWh 40 kWh 10.02
mid-January

4.2.2 Comparison results

Above, we discussed the energy consumption patterns detected when IntelliHome was used.
Now, we compare energy consumption data before and after IntelliHome implementation. Table 2
presents a comparison between the electrical consumption in both scenarios. In Mexico, the
electric bills correspond to a bimonthly period.
As can be observed in Table 2, IntelliHome can reduce electricity consumption between 7.9%
and 13.9% per period. Furthermore, it can be observed the electricity consumption had a slight
reduction every period. Once dataset and system performance were analyzed, we noted that this
reduction can be ascribed to the fact that, every 2-month period, users accepted more recommen-
dations concerning home appliances usage. In general terms, we ascribe energy consumption
reduction achieved by using IntelliHome to two main reasons:

• Optimal use of different home appliances. For instance, the temperature of the living room was
set to the optimum temperature range (21◦ C-24◦ C) and, when the system does not detect the
presence of some user, the air conditioner was turned off.
• The user accepts recommendations provided by IntelliHome regarding home appliances usage.
As was previously mentioned, home energy consumption is directly influenced by occupants’
behavior. Therefore, IntelliHome performance highly depends on the user’s participation, that
is, it depends on the number of accepted recommendations. For instance, before using Intel-
liHome, the air-conditioner ran continuously from 15:30 to 18:30. The reason is that users
needed to maintain the temperature of the living room at 24◦ C. By using IntelliHome, it can
turn on and turn off the air-conditioner automatically to maintain the optimum temperature
in the human thermal comfort (between 18◦ C and 24◦ C). Finally, we also noted that users that
accepted most recommendations were able to reduce more energy consumption.

5 EVALUATION

We evaluated the performance of the time series forecasting method that is behind the rec-
ommendations generated by the HECM component of the proposed architecture, that is, the
Holt-Winters-RNN method, with respect to some benchmark and competing methods of the M4
16 PAREDES-VALVERDE et al.

Forecasting Competition. This evaluation was made as an analysis of the error in the forecasts of
these methods in our dataset using the symmetric mean absolute percentage error (sMAPE) met-
ric, a common metric of time series forecasting accuracy.57 The objective of this error analysis was
to corroborate the superiority of the performance of the Holt-Winters-RNN method compared to
some benchmark and competing methods of the M4 Forecasting Competition for the case of our
dataset.
For the sake of comprehensiveness, we selected two benchmark methods and one compet-
ing method of the M4 Forecasting Competition as baseline methods for this evaluation. In the
first case, we specifically selected a statistical baseline method, namely, a combination based
on the simple arithmetic average of the methods Simple Exponential Smoothing, Double Expo-
nential Smoothing (aka Holt’s Linear Trend) and Damped Trend Exponential Smoothing. We
also selected a machine learning (ML)-based baseline method, namely, a multilayer perceptron
ANN for regression. It is worth nothing that, from these benchmark methods, the former was
outperformed only by 17 out of the 50 submissions of the M4 Forecasting Competition that were
regarded as valid for prediction purposes. In the second case, we specifically selected the com-
bination method proposed by Montero-Manso et al, academic researchers from the University
of A. Coruña (Spain) and Monash University (Australia), which was the second most accurate
method of the competition. This combination cannot be however judged as a hybrid method
as it comprises seven well-known statistical methods for time series forecasting available in R,
including ARIMA, RW-DRIFT (Random Walk with Drift) and Naïve, and only one ML-based
method, namely, a Single-Layer Perceptron ANN for regression.

5.1 Methodology

This evaluation was conducted as an offline experiment following the next methodology:
1. We implemented the selected baseline time series forecasting methods using the R program-
ming language, specifically, the R packages provided by organizers and participants of the M4
Forecasting competition (https://github.com/M4Competition/M4-methods).
2. We used consumption values of the real dataset generated in the context of the case study
presented in this paper as training data for both the time series forecasting method under
evaluation, that is, the Holt-Winters-RNN method, and the three baseline methods selected.
We specifically used consumption values from mid-March 2018 to mid-November 2018.
3. Likewise, we used consumption values of the real dataset collected during the case study as
test data to evaluate the four time series forecasting methods. We specifically used consump-
tion values from mid-November 2018 to mid-January 2019 for that purpose. A time window
of previous 30 days was used to predict the values for the next 30 days with 95% confidence
interval.
4. The accuracy of each of the four methods was measured using the sMAPE metric.
5. The results were compared against each other to derive some meaningful insights.

5.2 Results

Table 3 lists the sMAPE values calculated for the time series forecasting method under evaluation
and for the three baseline methods selected. As can be observed, the lowest sMAPE measure
PAREDES-VALVERDE et al. 17

T A B L E 3 Accuracy of the time series forecasting methods considered in the forecast error analysis
(sMAPE values)

Holt-Winters- Combination method by Statistical ML baseline

RNN method Montero-Manso et al baseline method method
sMAPE 13.906 14.490 15.283 16.971

was achieved by the hybrid Holt-Winters-RNN method, which supports our decision to integrate
it into the IntelliHome’s architecture. The Holt-Winters-RNN method specifically achieved an
sMAPE value of 13.906. It is worth mentioning that we used the variation of the sMAPE metric
that takes the average of the absolute value of the actual observation and the absolute value of
the forecast in the denominator.58 This variation is popular among forecasting competitions, and
it is particularly preferred to the MAPE metric because it allows alleviating the bias that favors
positive estimation errors.
Figure 4 depicts the energy consumption forecasts resulting from the use of the four time
series forecasting methods. Figure 4A corresponds to the Holt-Winter-RNN method; Figure 4B
corresponds to the combination method by Montero-Manso et al; Figure 4C corresponds to the
statistical baseline method; and Figure 4D corresponds to the ML baseline method. x-axis in the
graphs represent the days in the mid-November 2018 to mid-January 2019 period while y-axis
represents electricity consumption values (kWh); circular dots in lines therefore represent daily
electricity values predicted for that period.

(A) (B)

(C) (D)

F I G U R E 4 Energy consumption forecasting using the time series forecasting method under evaluation
and the three baseline methods selected
18 PAREDES-VALVERDE et al.

5.3 Discussion

As can be observed from Table 3, the Holt-Winters-RNN method outperformed the combination
method proposed by Montero-Manso et al by 4.200%; it also outperformed the combination based
on the simple arithmetic average of the methods Simple Exponential Smoothing, Double Expo-
nential Smoothing (aka Holt’s Linear Trend) and Damped Trend Exponential Smoothing, that
is, the statistical baseline method, by 9.909%; finally, it outperformed the multilayer perceptron
ANN model for regression, that is, the ML baseline method, by 22.041%.
These findings are in agreement with the findings of the M4 Forecasting Competition. In
this context, the conclusions of the organizers of that competition that hybrid and combina-
tion methods unlike individual statistical and ML methods are the way forward for improving
the forecasting accuracy and making forecasting more valuable are valid in our case. Nonethe-
less, putting aside the nature of our dataset, we believe that some of the preprocessing actions,
for example, actions regarding reshaping to form continuous time series, that we specifically
performed on our data might have slightly affected the accuracy of the four time series fore-
casting methods if we compare it to the one reported by the organizers of the M4 Forecasting
Competition.

6 CO NCLUSIONS A ND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

In this work, we presented a system for energy consumption monitoring and controlling in home
environments called IntelliHome. This system can be considered as a supporting tool for the home
energy saving task since it provides energy saving recommendations based on large amounts
of data obtained from the IoT-based home network that capture the user’s behavior patterns
and preferences regarding the use of electrical home appliances. For this purpose, IntelliHome
requires historical data collected from the smart home network. The strength of this system is
given by the possibility of keep user’s preferences regarding home appliances use as well as room
ambient conditions (temperature and lighting). On the other hand, we also introduced a proof of
concept about the advantages of using an energy monitoring system in the home environment
since it allows users to reduce costs related to electrical energy consumption. Case study’s results
obtained show that total power consumption in a typical residential dwelling can be reduced
thanks to the use of IntelliHome. From these results, we also note that users play a key role to
improve energy efficiency. Therefore, we expect that the case study results will encourage users
to integrate energy management systems at their home as well as to actively participate in energy
saving.
A strong motivation for this work is given by the fact that in the future, electric energy
price will increase. Therefore, future efforts will be mainly focused on improving IntelliHome
by taking into account different real home environments. In this sense, we will conduct more
experiments on medium and big size houses equipped with a bigger number of smart appli-
ances. On the other hand, the great adoption of Big data technologies for developing data analysis
systems encourages the use of deep learning technologies. Therefore, we also plan to use deep
learning-based mechanisms not only to predict energy consumption but also to learn better data
representations for the recognition of energy usage patterns and users’ behavior patterns on the
data collected from the smart home network.
As future work, we also plan to include information about the users’ out-of-home location
aiming to estimate the time of arriving home and then generate optimal scheduling plans for
PAREDES-VALVERDE et al. 19

home appliances such as coffee maker, heater water, among others. For this purpose, IntelliHome
will integrate information coming from the GPS of users’ smartphones. Moreover, we plan to
implement methods that allow the system to manage alternative energy suppliers such as solar
panels, as well as to select the supplier of the energy of specific home appliances in different
situations. Some of the limitations of this work that we plan to overcome in future researches are
briefly discussed below.

6.1 Limitations

The time series forecasting method that is behind the recommendations generated by the HECM
component of the proposed architecture was not conceived to deal with multiple time series, that
is, it is not able to predict the observation at the next time step in multiple time series simulta-
neously but to predict the observation at the next step in a single time series. This means that it
cannot be used to forecast energy consumption at every individual room of a house but to forecast
global home energy consumption. The HECM component of the proposed architecture is there-
fore not aimed to generate personalized energy-saving recommendations to each occupant (ie, to
each individual room) of the same house, which would also imply the ability to learn and con-
sider individual user’s preferences. Nonetheless, we believe that it would be interesting to conduct
research in this direction.
Moreover, as part of the implementation of the IntelliHome system, we developed a native
mobile application for the Android operating system. The mobile device compatibility of the
IntelliHome system is therefore currently limited to Android-based mobile devices, even though
we know that the iOS operating system dominates the tablet market. We will address this issue
in future works by taking advantage of a cross-platform app development framework, such as
Angular, Ionic or Cordova.
With regard to the case study presented in this paper, we should point out that due to some
time constraints faced during the development of this research, we were unable to collect a dataset
on the energy usage of home appliances before the IntelliHome system was used in every house
of the study sample. This would have given us the possibility to make more findings that validate
our research hypothesis by enabling the discovery of energy usage patterns and users’ behavior
patterns in data regarding conditions of normal use of home appliances. We plan to address this
issue in future experiments on medium and big size real environments.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors are grateful to the National Technological Institute of Mexico (Tecnológico Nacional
de Mexico, TecNM) for supporting this work. This research was also sponsored by Mexico’s
National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT) and the Secretariat of Public Education
(SEP) through PRODEP.

ORCID
Giner Alor-Hernández https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3296-0981
20 PAREDES-VALVERDE et al.

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How to cite this article: Paredes-Valverde MA, Alor-Hernández G, García-Alcaráz JL,

Salas-Zárate MP, Colombo-Mendoza LO, Sánchez-Cervantes JL. IntelliHome: An internet
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