Adding energy saving features into home automation comes easier

17 June 2008

In the near future new applications can be easily added into home and building automation to save energy. A bioclimatic house may provide energy savings up to 80 - 90% compared to a conventional building.

Adding energy saving features into home automation comes easier

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has together with its European partners launched a thee-year project to develop a platform which makes it possible to add energy saving applications into one's home almost as simply as putting a sticker on a door.

The overall goal of the project is to produce and test technology that will simplify the development and deployment of opportunistic computing applications to a considerable degree.

Today, the full cooperation potential of the current low-level technology remains unexploited due to the inability to program such object collections in a straightforward way.

"The technology to be developed, will enable programmers to develop in a simple way portable applications that can be deployed and harness the resources available in different operational settings," says Markus Tamberger, Project Coordinator at VTT.

The application is packaged in a deployment unit called Application Pill, which the user activates at any point in time. As a result, the software spreads the application's micro-agents to the objects with the suitable resources found in the environment.

Such functionality could be important in many different application areas and could play a particularly crucial role in boosting application development for the industrial players which provide the facilities and appliances.

Customized for home automation

The project will especially focus to customize the platform for the area of home and building automation where such technology could play a particularly crucial role for reducing energy consumption.

The application is packaged in a deployment unit called Application pill, which the user activates at any point in time. As a result, the middleware spreads the application's micro-agents to the objects with the suitable resources found in the environment.

The hardware devices with the POBICOS middleware and indicative proof-of-concept applications will be deployed and tested in a bioclimatic building using various sensors and actuators.

The sensors measure key environmental parameters, such as temperature, humidity and luminosity, and the actuators feature controllable elements.

Regular objects may include e.g. blinds, windows, air-conditioning units, lighting, refrigerators and watches equipped with sense-compute-actuate embedded nodes.

VTT acts as coordinator for POBICOS project. Other partners include, Warsaw University of Technology (Poland), Center for Research and Technology Thessaly (Greece), Accenture Technology Labs (France), SAE Automation, s.r.o. (Slovakia) and Center for Renewable Energy Sources (Greece).

Sources and more information:

Pobicos website

VTT