An EUD Approach to Creating Feasible and Energy-Saving Automations for Smart Homes

This paper presents a novel approach to creating automations for smart home environments, which leverages conversational interaction and is able to detect potential issues during automation creation. Issues may concern the possibility of conflicts between automations, when they aim to set appliances in contradictory modes at the same time or of chains of automations that may lead to unexpected smart home behaviours. Other issues considered in the approach are related to the excessive energy consumption of the automations. All the emerging issues and the ways to solve them are explained to the users in natural language during automation creation. The resulting system can thus help users better control their smart home and obtain suggestions about more sustainable behaviours. A first study with a mixed-method evaluation performed with 10 participants demonstrates the feasibility of the approach.