Design of an innovative solution to integrate and orchestrate IoT technologies with chatbots for smart home automation

Nowadays, smart homes are rapidly gaining popularity but significant challenges still affect the sector. For instance, optimizing energy usage is essential to fully harness their potentiality. Many existing solutions rely on conventional control methods that require user interaction or need experts to configure complex automatic rules. This paper presents an innovative framework that exploits multiple chatbots to autonomously manage operations in smart homes. The framework acts at all the levels of an IoT system by autonomously: collect real-time data from sensors, interpret data, make decisions based on revealed situations, actuate strategies through actuators, and contact users in case of criticalities. Such an automation is performed through three different types of chatbots, i.e., AutomationBot, SensorBot, and ActuatorBot, each performing dedicated roles in real-time system monitoring, decision-making, and operation management. They autonomously manage and coordinate operations, only escalating issues to the user in critical scenarios, ensuring efficient system functioning with minimal user involvement 24 h a day, 7 days a week. It can be programmed by every kind of user through the provided no-code platform. The system’s effectiveness has been assessed through a series of experiments conducted in a simulated smart home environment developed through various technologies (i.e., MQTT, RabbitMQ, Raspberry Pi, Tiledesk-Chat21) focusing on heat pump management and indoor environmental condition regulation. Our results highlight that the chatbot system could independently monitor, control, and optimize operation of critical devices, maintaining operational reliability and user comfort with manual intervention. The framework represents a significant step toward realizing fully autonomous chatbot-driven smart homes.