Committee

• Etienne CRAYE, Professor at the Ecole Centrale de Lille (France), President
  
• Maria Pia FANTI, Professor at Politecnico di Bari (Italy), Reviewer
  
• Jan LUNZE, Professor at the Ruhr Universität Bochum (Germany), Reviewer
  
• Jean-Jacques LESAGE, Professor at the ENS Cachan (France), Advisor
  
• Lothar LITZ, Professor at the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern (Germany), Advisor

Keywords: Discrete Event Systems, Finite Automata, Smart Home, Inhabitants Location Tracking.

Abstract
Life expectancy has continuously increased in most industrialized countries over the last decades and will probably continue to increase in the future. This leads to new challenges relative to the autonomy and the independence of elderly. The development of Smart Homes is a direction to face these challenges and to enable people to live longer in a safe and comfortable environment. Making a home smart consists in placing sensors, actuators and a controller in the house in order to take into account the behavior of their inhabitants and to act on their environment to improve their safety, health and comfort. Most of these approaches are based on the real-time indoor Location Tracking of the inhabitants. In this thesis, a whole new approach for model-based Location Tracking of an a priori unknown number of inhabitants is proposed. This approach is based on Discrete Event Systems paradigms, theory and tools. Three main contributions are proposed:

• The usage of Finite Automata (FA) to model the detectable motion of the inhabitants as well as different methods to create such FA models have been developed.
  
• Based on these models, algorithms to perform efficient Location Tracking are defined.
  
• Finally, several approaches aiming at evaluating the relevance of the instrumentation of a Smart Home with the objective of Location Tracking are proposed.
  
  

The different contributions are illustrated on case studies. The approach has also been fully implemented and tested.