An android multi-protocol application for heterogeneous building automation systems

Abstract

According to the Internet of Things, the future home, the so-called Smart Home, will be a seamless integration of physical smart objects, interacting among them and with the surrounding environment. Moreover, since, nowadays, mobile devices are used to manage many aspects of people's lives, the capability to control and manage Smart Homes through them will become a primary requirement. Unfortunately, the technologies for Smart Homes are often not interoperable among them and the implementation of mobile applications dedicated to these technologies is quite hard for non tech-savvy users. So, in this paper, we propose a flexible approach that allows to efficiently manage, through an Android terminal, a building automation system composed of heterogeneous smart devices. Our solution is based on the capability to semantically describe both the application structure and the device functionalities. Leveraging such a description, the GUI and the business logic of the application is automatically built and configured without any technical and programming knowledge. Moreover, an easily-extensible multi-protocol gateway is integrated in the application, so as providing a transparent access to the heterogeneous underlying technologies. The effectiveness of the proposal is evaluated through a real use case in which heterogeneous devices are involved.