A Semantics-Rich Information Technology Architecture for Smart Buildings

The design of smart homes, buildings and environments currently suffers from a low maturity of available methodologies and tools. Technologies, devices and protocols strongly bias the design process towards vertical integration, and more flexible solutions based on separation of design concerns are seldom applied. As a result, the current landscape of smart environments is mostly populated by defectively designed solutions where application requirements (e.g., end-user functionality) are too often mixed and intertwined with technical requirements (e.g., managing the network of devices). A mature and effective design process must, instead, rely on a clear separation between the application layer and the underlying enabling technologies, to enable effective design reuse. The role of smart gateways is to enable this separation of concerns and to provide an abstracted view of available automation technology to higher software layers. This paper presents a blueprint for the information technology (IT) architecture of smart buildings that builds on top of established software engineering practices, such as model-driven development and semantic representation, and that avoids many pitfalls inherent in legacy approaches. The paper will also present a representative use case where the approach has been applied and the corresponding modeling and software tools

Interacting with Smart Environments: Users, Interfaces, and Devices

A Smart Environment is an environment enriched with disappearing devices, acting together to form an “intelligent entity”. In such environments, the computing power pervades the space where the user lives, so it becomes particularly important to investigate the user’s perspective in interacting with her surrounding. Interaction, in fact, occurs when a human performs some kind of activity using any computing technology: in this case, the computing technology has an intelligence of its own and can potentially be everywhere. There is no well-defined interaction situation or context, and interaction can happen casually or accidentally. The objective of this dissertation is to improve the interaction between such complex and different entities: the human and the Smart Environment. To reach this goal, this thesis presents four different and innovative approaches to address some of the identified key challenges. Such approaches, then, are validated with four corresponding software solutions, integrated with a Smart Environment, that I have developed and tested with end-users. Taken together, the proposed solutions enable a better interaction between diverse users and their intelligent environments, provide a solid set of requirements, and can serve as a baseline for further investigation on this emerging topic

Ambient orchestration in assisted environment

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) stands for information and communication technology enabled smart home environment that serves persons, especially the elderly and disabled in their independent living. Among many already developed AAL systems, technologies, resources and services, the main problem about their inherent interconnection still remains. One of the big research issues is to propose reference architecture and develop an open and standardized platform that should serve wider community as an enabler for cooperating concept – collaboration between competitors. This paper presents an experimental ambient orchestration in assisted environment on top of universAAL middleware that is based on the reference architecture under development within universAAL research project. Our contributions are the following: interconnection scenario using industry commercial products, verification of reference architecture and user guides, developed web services for ambient orchestration within case study and its demonstration in real environment

Open multi-technology building energy management system

Energy Efficiency is one of the goals of the Smart Building initiatives. This paper presents an Open Energy Management System which consists of an ontology-based multi-technology platform and a wireless transducer network using 6LoWPAN communication technology. The system allows the integration of several building automation protocols and eases the development of different kind of services to make use of them. The system has been implemented and tested in the Energy Efficiency Research Facility at CeDInt-UPM

Iterative Model-based Identification of Building Components and Appliances by Means of Sensor-Actuator Networks

2nd Workshop on eeBuildings Data Models, CIB W078 ‐ W102, Sophia Antipolis ‐ FranceA key challenge for home/building automation applications, especially energy management, is to enable the indirect integration of legacy home/building appliances and building components that do not have a network connection to the home/building network, to make it possible to monitor and partially control them. We propose a mechanism and system for the iterative identification and self-configuration of these devices through a shared backplane of networked sensors and actuators available in the building. This makes it possible to integrate these devices and interface them through a software proxy as if they were state of the art networked devices, thus extending the range of the network and the associated middleware towards all kinds of physical entities of that make up the home/building. These entities are supposed to be described in a model repository and a domain-specific ontology. The matching of the entities being discovered in the home/building environment to these known models is done by analog pattern matching, instead of requiring an exact match as would be the case with a standard digital networks protocol, so that it lends itself to iterative approximation. The architecture and OSGi-based implementation of this system are described. Examples are provided for typical home appliances and other subsystems of the home/building that may be dealt with in a similar way