Ambient Assisted Energy Management

Abstract

While discussing mainly new Web 2.0 developments, another wave of information technology comes up to industrialized societies: Ambient computing, wearable computers, and the Internet of Things. This new wave of computing does not only change the relationship between humans and computers; it is as well a question of (non-) sustainable development: increasing consumption of resources and energy in the production phase, reduced periods of use phases (for example: the life-cycle of mobile phones is significantly reduced), and increasing problems in recycling and waste disposal. But ambient computing has also a high potential to modify the society’s treatment of resources and energy. The interaction with “intelligent” things can change our conception of production and consumption: instead of input and output rather “from cradle to cradle” (Braungart) or “socio-technical metabolism” (the underlying image of industrial ecology). In this paper we present an ambient computing approach to decentralized energy management. From our point of view, this is only the first step to realize IT-based industrial metabolism in industrialized as well as developing countries. Nevertheless, first experiences demonstrate that the cooperation of different sustainability sciences is required. An important role plays computer science (environmental informatics). This contribution is written mainly in the computer science perspective.