Abstract

Home automation became a mainstream trend in the recent years. Managing the services of our home remotely and automating (the interplay of) its services through in-place sensors and actuators goes beyond increasing the comfort of the inhabitants. The newest generation of home automation systems also put an emphasis on reducing the energy consumption of homes, thus leading to reduced costs and higher sustainability. The configuration of home automation systems is a typically a manual work, during which the end-user interfaces with the system through a rule-based pattern language to configure the system with executable if-then scenarios, thus providing the automation logic. To increase the effects of cost reduction and sustainability, these configuration rules may become very complex and currently available configuration languages may fall short of capturing essential patterns. A pertinent example are temporal patterns. Typical home automation configuration languages only support a restricted set of temporal constructs. To overcome this limitation, we briefly investigate the configuration language of a popular home automation stack, openHAB [1] and identify its shortcomings. Motivated by these, we develop a pattern language for home automation with built-in temporal operators. The operators are motivated by the foundational work of J.F. Allen [2], but state-of-the-art frameworks [3] will be investigated as well. The execution semantics of the language will be provided by mapping the language onto an appropriate execution engine [4], which in turn, can be integrated with openHAB in the future. This will make our language fully compliant with openHAB.

  Reading Phase

Reading Report (PDF)
Reading Presentation (PDF)

  Implementation Phase

Final Report (PDF)
Final Presentation (PDF)
Project Materials (ZIP)