Powerline Communication in Home-Building Automation Systems

Domotics, Smart Home Systems, Ambient Intelligence are all terms that describe the intelligent cooperation of several different equipments to manage the home environment in an intelligent, safe and comfortable way. The same idea is also applicable to bigger constructions, and in that case it takes the name of Building Automation. Whatever term one wants to use, it refers to a multidisciplinary field that includes informatics, electronics, automation and telecommunication, and also touches fields like building constructions and architecture. In fact, during the process of designing a building, people have to consider appropriate spaces for the electric plant, and if the presence of a domotic system is planned, it is better to take it into account during the design phase, just to optimize spaces, the amount of used wires, the position of the modules and so on. There are really many home system producers in the world (Smart Home Systems, EIB-Konnex, Lonworks, Bticino, Vimar, Duemmegi, EasyDom Corporation, Futurware, Digital Cybermasters, Hills Home Systems, Intellihome etc, just to mention a few) , and their products differ from each others in many characteristics, such as functionality, dimension, weight, typology of installation, materials, net topology, power consumes, aesthetic appearance, communication protocol and communication mean. Regarding this last point, the majority of the domotic systems, especially in Europe, tend to use a dedicated bus cable to exchange data among modules, to make the communication link more robust and reliable. Lately, using radio communication is in fashion, but radio modules, respect to their equivalent standard ones, are more expensive, and in the bargain many people don’t want to use them due to the fear of radio signals (even if it were proved that they are completely harmless). Another communication mean, that is often not taken into account, is the powerline. In point of fact, using the installed poweline wires to send information is a very smart idea: there is no additional cost to install other dozens of meters of wires, there is not the necessity to break the walls and to do building works at home, there are no interferences with other devices (like in the radio communication case) or reflection problems (like in the infrared case), there is the possibility to put the modules in every place (it is sufficient to have an electrical socket in the nearness, or to use an extension cable), there is no need to have an extra power source (usually, in a bus cable domotic system, there is a direct voltage generated by a power supply and distribuited on the whole domotic net). Moreover, powerline communication (PLC, also called BPL in the USA, where the acronym stays for Broadband over Power Line, or NPL, Narroband over Power Line) is not only used in a home environment to create a virtual net among domotic modules, but is also used on the power distribution net to perform actions like reading the electricity meter, monitoring the power consumes and the state of a building, finding faults along the net, detecting illegal electricity usages and to solve the so-called last mile problem , that is the problem related to the final leg of delivering connectivity from a communications provider to a customer. In fact a cheap possibility to cover this final leg is using powerline communication. The intent of this work is therefore to illustrate, going into more details, advantages and disadvantages of the powerline communication systems (PLCS), to show the differences between PLCS for power distribution net and PLCS for home and building environments, to indagate the methods to send data over the powerline, to explain which are the automations that is possible to connect and to control in a powerline domotic system and to show some case studies tackled by the authors

Assistive Human-Machine Interfaces for Smart Homes

Computer systems have shown in the past (Zajicek, 2000) that they can be powerful allies in home-based health care and offer great potential to improve quality of life - but only if they are designed to take into consideration the specific needs of their beneficiaries. Satisfying usability as well as the functional requirements in such a home setting are equally critical. This paper discusses the development of user interfaces, following the “Designfor- all” philosophy, oriented towards a multi-agent system interacting with an intelligent engine. Originally, the system will focus on the control of white goods (large kitchen appliances) but will have scalability properties making it appropriate and extensible for the inclusion of other devices that may be deployed thereafter. The interfaces must be flexible enough to adapt to the targeted public, fit any user’s preferences and/or needs and make the interaction as simple and intuitive as possible. This work is part of the EU FP6 IST e-inclusion ‘EASY LINE+’ project

Design of a portable touchscreen interface for powerline domotic systems

This paper concerns the study and the realization of a portable touchscreen interface designed for the control of domotic systems, in tthis particular case based on powerline communication. The project is fundamentally thought for disabled people with problems in manual dexterity and mobility, but its funcionalities can be exploited also by able-body people. The powerline domotic system has been chosen for its characteristics of versatility, low cost and simplicity of installation, besides the opportunity to be used as an exellent tool in the academic educational field