Low cost arduino/android-based energy-efficient home automation system with smart task scheduling

In this paper, we make use of Home Automation techniques to design and implement a remotely controlled, energy-efficient and highly scalable Smart Home with basic features that safeguard the residents' comfort and security. Our system consists of a house network (sensors and appliance actuators to respectively get information from and control the house environment). As a central controller, we used an Arduino microcontroller that communicates with an Android application, our user interface. Our house network brings together both wireless Zigbee and wired X10 technologies, thus making it a cost-efficient hybrid system. Events can be programmed to be triggered under specific conditions, and this can have a great role in reducing the total energy consumed by some appliances. On the other hand, the system can suggest smart task scheduling. The scheduling algorithm we present is a heuristic for the Resource-constrained-scheduling problem (RCPSP) with hybrid objective function merging both resource-leveling and weighted completion time considerations. © 2013 IEEE.