Back to Classics: Controlling Smart Thermostats with Natural Language... with Personalization.

Fuzzy Sets and Fuzzy Logic are classical tools for controlling devices, including thermostats. Fuzzy sets have been also used to describe Natural Language hedges that appear in every day speech. We use both of these classic applications for personalized thermal preferences of occupants with a goal of saving energy. As such, we combine previous knowledge on preferred comfort temperature range of groups of individuals with fuzzy hedges for temperature control setting, create fuzzy sets for energy consumption and saving, and use the intersection of the created sets with the preferred temperatures to optimize natural language interpretations of occupants’ commands on temperature settings of smart thermostats.