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SHELL: Shared Interoperable Home Ecosystems for a Green, ComfortabLe and Safe Living


Subject: The advanced electronic and computational features exhibited by consumer products and white goods in home premises, and by personal communication devices, make it possible to communicate among heterogeneous objects (white goods, tablets, home automation plants, home theatre). While different devices are even more interconnected and interacting, real market opportunities potentially enabled, do not appear easy to stimulate and create. The first goal of this project is to move from potential opportunities to sound outcomes, starting from consumer products on the market, to ensure business revenues since the very initial phase. Further, the project will implement research activities aimed at the evolution towards new solutions, innovative business models, and opportunities. The project proposes an open, free and accessible interoperability framework, as the main backbone and enabling tool for vertical solutions, in different and multifunctional contexts (energy, security, comfort). Through interconnection, the totally open and accessible infrastructure will promote the innovation process: anyone will be able to use the infrastructure to interface compliant objects and systems, and to add functionalities. A win2win model will be implemented, based on open innovation and cooperation initiatives among manufacturers and other stakeholders, big, medium and small enterprises, to enforce traditional business, on one hand, and to generate new opportunities driven by interoperability, on the other. Technological interoperability will translate into business/market interoperability, through the provisioning of new professional competencies. The project aims at making the home environment and equipments interoperable, to increase the energy efficiency, the security, and the living comfort of the whole premise. The home gets ready to become a functional and interoperable node in a more extended Smart Community, open to the new possibilities of the Smart Cities.

The proposed activities will change the home into a set of shared and interoperable ecosystems, matching technology and people needs; the living environment will provide traditional home automation functionalities, but also generate actions and feelings exactly designed around the users. This target requires a complete technological sublayer, based on the integration of any possible interface, and ambient and structural sensor networks. Household appliances, furniture, frames, and any other element that may interact with the person in the home, become information sources for the core system, that is in charge of taking decisions and controlling actions. To such an aim, suitable ontologies, for physical and virtual devices, and semantic descriptions, for the possible interactions among them, will be defined. The interoperability framework will also include the definition of hardware reference designs, referred to interface modules, gateways, necessary to enable the interoperability among legacy objects and systems, and sensor networks. Once the technological sublayer is available, the project will move to the services, by introducing the manager concept, a set of algorithms that do not focus on physical devices but on their functionalities. Each manager is related to the specific services and functions to be provided: energy manager, comfort manager, safety&security manager.

The information sharing paradigm, that qualifies the framework for interoperability, will represent the common element in the project activities, and will make it possible for the whole home system to share its data and actions, and make them available, in order to enable the effective integration of advanced and adaptive human-machine interfaces, and to make the home system ready for the interaction with upper-level hierarchical entities. Finally, the project foresees integration, prototyping and functional test activities, to experimentally validate the framework and its hardware and software components.



Partners:

Leaff contribution

Leaff will investigate the interoperability framework interactions with those technologies that allow the integration of multimedia devices with home automation framework and, in particular, the DLNA-UPnP, in order to identify a set of constraints and requirements that the framework should take into consideration. Hardware modules will be studied and designed which will be natively interoperable with domotic multimedia systems.



Co-funded by: Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Università e della Ricerca - Bando per lo sviluppo e potenziamento di Cluster Tecnologici Nazionali di cui al Decreto Direttoriale 257/Ric del 30 maggio 2012

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