Extending a Smart Home Multi-Agent System with Role-Based Access Control

Home Manager is an open source agent-based application for the control of an intelligent home, implemented on top of the TuCSoN coordination infrastructure, and aimed at satisfying the users goals and preferences (lighting, temperature, etc.) while achieving the global house policies and objectives (e.g. energy saving). The first prototype, however, was kept intentionally simple, with a limited number of rooms, user types, appliances, and user policies: in particular, user access control did not adopt a role-based (RBAC) model. Therefore, in this paper we extend and generalise the previous system, designing an agent-based RBAC engine – first in general, then specialising its features to the Home Manager case study – and incorporate it into a new prototype targeted to a larger house, with a larger set of appliances and user roles, and supporting the dynamic definition of user policies and constraints.