BUSINESS ARCHITECTURE DESIGN

Business Architecture Design

Business Architecture Design

Introduction

There is a growing demand in designing a flexible smart home architecture that aims to interoperate among heterogeneous sensors, actuators and other services. The objective of developing such architecture is to support the users in the pervasive home environment such that they can access any service in a seamless fashion. A flexible architecture should seamlessly incorporate newly evolved services and/or enable modifications to existing services with minimal effort, despite the fact that the new or existing services may be tied to a different vendor with vendor-specific interface. In order to fulfill this goal, several technologies have evolved such as OSGi, UPnP, Web Service, Jini, HAVi and so on (Bourcier, 2006).

These technologies provide the option to interconnect heterogeneous devices and services; however, not all of them can equally accommodate the others under the same hood. One of the very promising technologies that can be used to address this issue is the Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS), which can work with these technologies and provide interoperability among the different devices and services in a smart home environment (Tajika, 2003). In this paper, we will investigate the suitability of DPWS in developing a flexible smart home architecture .

Motivating Scenarios

In this section, we state some motivating scenarios which could represent a usual system behavior in a smart home environment. We assume there are different devices and services such as motion sensors, cameras, pressure sensor in the couch and armchair, light control, HVAC, TV, HiFi, and speakers all connected to a smart home network, as shown in Figure 1. In such a setting, a system performs several tasks to support the user's need. For example:

When a user enters the room (detected by motion sensor and/or identified by camera), the lights are turned on, and the HVAC is activated (Wu, 2007).

When a user sits on the couch in front of a TV, the TV is switched on, light level is dimmed to low and the speakers are switched to TV to output the sound.

If he/she sits on the armchair close to the window with a book, the lamp close to the armchair is automatically turned on, the ambient music is selected and the speakers are switched to HiFi system with a low volume setting.

When the user leaves the room, all the devices are off (lamps, HVAC, TV, HiFi).

At any moment, a GUI in user's phone allows him/her to manually control any of the artifacts in the room.

Figure 1: Several devices are connected to a typical smart home architecture

Requirements and DPWS overview

A smart home environment should be an active space where new devices can be incorporated without requiring complex installation or update process (ideally, full plug & play solutions) (Helal, 2005). The desired situation could be described as follows: get a new device, plug it in the home network, and immediately work together with existing devices, performing new individual and collaborative tasks, enhancing the overall functionality, but without a complex setup ...