An event-based language for simplified definition of home automation control routines

Abstract

Capabilities of the devices installed in a smart home are often fully accessible only to qualified integrators. As the users become more interested in setting up their home automation devices by their own, there is a need to bridge the gap between the magnitude of possibilities offered by home automation devices and the limitations of the methods accessible to the user. This paper proposes an event-based language that allows defining of home automation control routines in a form of statements which are uncomplicated, easy to learn for intermediate users, while being easy to interpret by microcontrollers with low processing power that are widespread in home automation devices. All the complexity related to defining rules has been covered by the language that provides access to various capabilities of a smart home under self-explanatory function names. The mechanism that executes statements written in the proposed language has been successfully implemented on a hardware platform with 8-bit microcontroller. KNX standard has been used for communication with home automation devices in this research in examples and case studies. During the test the proposed solution proved to be reliable and efficient for purpose of writing and executing eventbased home automation control routines.