Smart Home Services Enabled by Service Level Agreements Shahid Hussain, Rune Gustavsson, Lars Nordström Industrial Control and Systems. Electrical Engineering Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm, Sweden shahid.hussain@ics.kth.se, rune.gustavsson@ics.kth.se, lars.nordstrom@ics.kth.se Abstract—The challenge for the future Smart Grids is to improve the energy efficiency and enable groups of stakeholders to offer services to customers. An intelligent agent-based ICT infrastructure supplementing SCADA systems is required to support such perspectives of power grids. This paper focus on describing a novel approach, using Service Level Agreements (SLAs) as a tool, for improving coordination between high-level Smart Grid business requirements and low level infrastructure affordances. Monitoring of SLAs and trustworthy data management requires setting up and monitoring clusters of SLAs coordinating sets of relevant stakeholders. We argue that coordinating services with infrastructures using SLA, as a coordination mechanism is a promising approach towards sustainable Smart Grid solutions. A case study of agent-based comfort monitoring and control in Smart homes illustrates our approach and related tools. Keywords- Smart Home, Coordination, Services, Service Level Agreements, SLAs, Mapping perceived parameters – physical parameters, Monitoring, Multi Agent Systems I. INTRODUCTION There is a need for means and tools improving Energy Efficiency (EE) due to the expected rising demand of energy consumption in urban and commercial sectors that covers 50% of EU electricity consumption today [1]. More efforts are required by all stakeholders to enable improved future energy production, distribution and usage. Novel business models are necessary to support the transition from today’s situation to tomorrows Smart Grid based on markets of energy-based services as presented [1–3]. Providing services based on user needs are one identified area by several EU funded projects [FENIX, SEESGEN-ICT], where power industry can capitalize and earn profit using the current infrastructure with add-on components for information processing and control. One of the identified barriers in this transition of systems is the inflexibility to add flexible business processes in today’s power systems, due to the tight coupling of the Grid hardware and SCADA (Sensory Control and Data Acquisition) presented in [4]. Future energy systems will become robust and efficient with careful integration of ICT (Information Communication and Technology) with production, transmission and distribution of power and alignment with relevant business processes. However, due to the difficulty to predict nature of changes in the infrastructures and business models as well as regulatory uncertainties, the pace of uptake and implementation of Smart Grid is hard to predict. The EU smart grid objectives to meet the Energy Efficiency (EE) goals specifically aimed at promoting: • Active Distribution Grids incorporating vast amounts of Distributed and Renewable Energy Sources (DER and RES) • Active empowered customers The term “active” in this setting refers to “smart” or “intelligent”. We suggest that careful selection and implementation of Multi-Agent technologies is crucial for Services supporting active customers as well as active distribution networks [5]. Agent technologies allow modelling systems as configurations of smart flexible components, for example, Active Network Management (ANM) of Distribution Grids [6]. Furthermore, The IEEE Power and Energy Society Multi-Agent Systems Working Group aim to promote the openness of agent architectures within the power domain. In this paper we argue that Service Level Agreements (SLAs), modelled and implemented as MAS, provides a control and monitoring mechanism of future Smart grids, assuring interoperability and QoS. SLA is a formal agreement between the service providers and the customers in the context of service provisioning. We have earlier advocated introduction and use of coordination and monitoring mechanisms based on Service Level Agreements (SLAs) [4], [5]. Introduction of SLAs enables a principled structuring of Smart Grid systems and related data flows. Identified challenges towards smart grids include coordination of sets of stakeholders and monitoring of processes related to new energy-based business processes. Our approach towards modelling and implementing Smart Grid is utilizing carefully chosen infrastructures in flexible couplings and integrations (configurations) of system components [4], [7]. The configurations should support monitoring of processes by clusters of SLAs implementing selected scenarios, such as Comfort management of Smart Homes (Section III). Our suggested approach is to introduce two interacting sets of SLAs, High-level and Low-level. The high-level set models business perspectives of the scenarios. The low- level sets coordinate and monitor the processes of the physical processes (c.f., SCADA systems). The