Adaptive and Sustainable Smart Environments Using Predictive Reasoning and Context-Aware Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Smart environments play a key role in improving user comfort, energy efficiency, and sustainability through intelligent automation. Nevertheless, real-world deployments still face major challenges, including network instability, delayed responsiveness, inconsistent AI decisions, and limited adaptability under dynamic conditions. Many existing approaches lack advanced context-awareness, effective multi-agent coordination, and scalable learning, leading to high computational cost and reduced reliability. To address these limitations, this paper proposes MACxRL, a lightweight Multi-Agent Context-Aware Reinforcement Learning framework for autonomous smart-environment control. The system adopts a three-tier architecture consisting of real-time context acquisition, lightweight prediction, and centralized RL-based decision learning. Local agents act quickly at the edge using rule-based reasoning, while a shared CxRL engine refines actions for global coordination, combining fast responsiveness with continuous adaptive learning. Experiments show that MACxRL reduces energy consumption by 45–60%, converges faster, and achieves more stable performance than standard and deep RL baselines. Future work will explore self-adaptive reward tuning and extend deployment to multi-room environments toward practical real-world realization.