Development of AI-based Smart Housing Platform and Intelligent Convergence Housing Service Technology
Development of AI-based Smart Housing Platform and Intelligent Convergence Housing Service Technology
▲ Senior Researcher Ahn Ki-uhn, Department of Building Research, KICT
Prologue
The demand to improve the quality of life and housing welfare of residents is growing, reflecting changes in the sociodemographic structure. Accordingly, a new type of housing infrastructure is also being established in the construction field to incorporate “smart” technologies into the residential space itself thanks to the spread of Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies such as AI, IoT, and Cloud. Existing smart home services are dependent on manufacturers and construction companies, from which all households and complexes are provided with a common platform and services; residents lack the freedom to select services, and there are restrictions on the introduction of new services. To overcome this problem, a smart housing environment is being built to support the independence of residents in selecting and using services through a platform with openness and scalability, where anyone can develop and register various services. The goal of this article is to introduce the concept and development direction of smart housing platforms and services that support the new housing infrastructure.
The Concept of Smart Housing
Smart housing is housing that provides an optimized spatial environment and services by linking and converging a physical smart house comprised of the space, environment, home appliances, devices, etc. which make up a house and related technologies, such as big data information technology, IoT smart home technology, and intelligent AI technology (Figure 1). These houses are realized as a new housing infrastructure, where the residential space itself acts a means of collecting information and providing services.
Smart Housing Platform
Existing smart home services require new physical components, such as devices and networks, to be newly built to use the services provided by providers. On the other hand, in smart housing, it is possible to provide and expand services without physical resource constraints by securing data and utilizing platform functions through the existing infrastructure, such as residential spaces, complexes, and smart cities. In this section, the smart housing platform service functions operating in the Cloud environment are explained by dividing them into IaaS (infrastructure as a service), PaaS (platform as a service), and SaaS (Software as a service) (Figure 2).
IaaS, a physical resource to implement smart housing, consists of sensors for collecting data, gateways for sending and receiving data between sensors and platforms, and servers for data storage, AI analysis, and service operation management. In particular, various sensors and IoT devices are embedded in the infill, allowing them to sense the physical elements of the living space. Gateways can be equipped with multi-protocol conversion handling capabilities to accommodate the networking diversity of data sources. At this time, a standard protocol defining the data format and communications standard are prepared to support wide-area service provision and data utilization.
The main functions of smart housing PaaS include security, integrated management of storage, multiple access/distributed processing, and the use of an AI analysis engine. First, security features authorization that grants user authentication and authority, encrypted communications between the housing environment and platform, and encryption and decryption of blockchain-based stored data. Data is managed according to the standard format classification system based on the smart housing standard protocol and supports the utilization of real-time and stored data. In addition, it has analysis/service spaces and functions to distribute and handle multi-processes, for load management according to multi-user access and service execution. PaaS integrates and manages AI models that can be used for residential services by data type, such as time series, voice, and video, in an AI bank, and provides an AI analysis engine API function that can be used for service model development and calculation.
Finally, the smart housing SaaS operates and manages intelligent residential services such as fire, crime prevention, comfort, convenience, and maintenance on the platform, and has functions to provide them to requesters using the service. Moreover, by utilizing the AI analysis engine function of PaaS, it has a scalability of functions which allows external developers to freely discover and develop services, and register them on the platform to distribute and operate services.
Smart Housing Service
To implement smart housing, we are developing AI-based convergence services in the four areas of safety, comfort, convenience, and maintenance by analyzing the needs of residents (Table 1), and are preparing to operate platform-based services. In addition, based on the function of the smart housing platform, new services are being discovered and expanded in various residential spaces and fields (Figure 3).
Epilogue
The Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT) is conducting research on "AI-based smart housing platform and service technology development" to provide an environment that enables the dissemination, development, and operation of creative and innovative services for high-quality housing environments. Through this research, it is anticipated that the foundation for future-oriented responsive housing welfare will be strengthened, and related industries such as housing services and smart devices will be revitalized by establishing a platform ecosystem in the area of smart housing.
