Conceptual features of the design of smart home systems

Introduction

Smart Home Systems (COURT) are a fairly old concept, which for more than a decade has been promoted under various accents by manufacturers of various equipment. At the same time, there is no coherent system of concepts, what is Smart House as such, no clarity of formulations and, accordingly, there is no uniformity in understanding what it is. As a result, there is a zoo of solutions on the market that declare themselves to be the COURT, but they are not, and the real COURT each time is a piece of goods, which is developed practically from scratch for each project and therefore is prohibitively expensive. The purpose of this material is to systematize the approaches in the design of the COURT, the streamlining of terminological diversity, the introduction of classifications of the COURT.

Terms and Definitions

• The Smart Home System (CAS) is a unified, interconnected, providing full automatic and automated monitoring and control system of interaction of all equipment at home, all networks and systems in order to organize their harmonious activities to ensure the comfort and safety of the human user.
• Smart House (Building) (UD) - a set of building structures, furnishings, all active and passive equipment of the House (Building), all networks and systems, including the COURT.

Purpose of the COURT

The purpose of the deployment of the COURT is to ensure the comfort and safety of the users of the DD. Each of the components of a DD without a COURT by itself ensures the fulfillment of its local tasks of ensuring comfort and / or safety, but the use of the COURT imparts to these systems a synergistic effect that exceeds the sum of their individual useful properties.
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Components of the COURT

In order to determine the target areas for the development of DD and AUD on its basis, the following classification of the directions of DD systems is introduced:

1. Engineering systems
2. Multimedia systems and communication
3. Telemedicine
4. Robotics

Engineering systems

Engineering systems are all life support and safety systems, such as:

1. Power supply
2. Lighting
3. Cold-water
4. Hot water supply
5. Heating
6. Conditioning
7. Ventilation
8. Waste management
9. OPS
10. CCTV
11. ACS

Multimedia systems and communication

By multimedia systems are meant all systems of consumption and content generation, such as:

1. SatTV
2. Ctv
3. IPTV
4. Video on demand
5. Analog radio
6. Internet radio
7. Satradio
8. Multimedia libraries, local and remote
9. PSTN
10. Mobile communication
11. IP Telephony
12. Gaming devices
13. Internet access

Telemedicine

Telemedicine refers to systems that provide remote monitoring of the user's health status and provide some medical manipulations, as well as help when necessary:

1. Instrumental monitoring of body parameters
2. Voice and visual monitoring of the body condition
3. Medical manipulations
4. Providing care for users with disabilities

Robotics

Under the robotics refers to mobile and embedded active systems that provide an active impact on the outside world:

1. Autonomous systems
2. Embedded Systems

External environment of the COURT

The COURT should not be designed as an autonomous system. It is necessary to immediately envisage its linkage with higher level systems. For example, the SU building, neighborhood, city and so on. It is necessary to provide for interaction with departmental and enterprise systems, for example, emergency systems, resource accounting systems, content and product delivery systems. Thus, it is necessary to immediately lay down opportunities for the interaction of the COURT with the outside world, which will ensure the additional quality of services provided by the COURT to the user.

Components of the COURT

The design of the CAS should be based on the model of component parts. It is necessary to understand which parts of the COURT are implemented, what are the requirements for them and how much they will be implemented in each particular case. The following classification of the components of the COURT is proposed:

1. Sensors - devices that provide information about the state of objects in the physical world
2. Executive devices - devices that provide an impact on the state of real-world objects according to commands
3. The network of data collection and transmission of commands - a set of systems that provide data from sensors and issuing commands to actuators, can be based on both wired and wireless technologies
4. Gateway to external systems - a subsystem that provides interface with external systems
5. Data storage system - a subsystem of data archiving of any kind, including the states of sensors and actuators, as well as any other necessary data
6. The system of ensuring user interaction - a subsystem that provides the user access to the functions of the COURT through a variety of client applications
7. Client application - a software and hardware system that provides the user access to all or part of the functions of the COURT
8. Intellectual core is a software system that provides the “intelligence” of the COURT. It can be of different levels, starting from a simple system of rules of the “what if” type, and ending with fairly complex AI systems based on expert systems and neural networks.

Network data collection and transmission commands

One of the important problems of the COURT is to ensure the connectivity of sensors and actuators with the core of the COURT. The communication system must meet the following requirements:

• Require a minimum amount of construction and installation work for their organization
• Build on low-cost components
• Provide reliable identification of active devices
• Provide high levels of data quality, resilient to interference
• Have enough bandwidth
• Have the ability to maintain performance in case of damage to part of the system and / or head units
• To provide the widest possible range of devices, as well as to support the easy integration of new devices into the system

There are three options for organizing such a network:

• Wireless
• By specially laid wires (usually twisted pair type)
• By power cables

Wireless systems

Wireless systems come in two forms: fixed topology and mesh networks. The first option is a classic network that is designed, deployed and routed manually. The second, more promising option is a self-configuring peer-to-peer network. These networks include:

• Z-wave
• Zigbee
• Bluetooth v4.0
• ONE-NET

Wired systems

Wired systems are usually built on the basis of serial protocols, such as 1-wire, and the like. The disadvantage is the need to install special cables. Also, as a rule, do not provide redundancy. Among the famous:

• Eib
• Lonworks

Wired power cable systems

There were some of the most famous and available until a certain time, but due to the low transmission speed, they are beginning to be crowded out by other systems. Among them:

• X-10 of the same name firm ;
• CEBus company Intellon ;
• LonWorks Corp. Echelon ;
• Adaptive Networks, proposed by the company with the same name ;
• DPL 1000 production NOR.WEB ;
• PLC Universal Powerline Association .

Intellectual core

If with other systems everything is more or less clear, then it is necessary to talk about the intellectual core in more detail. The main problem of the COURT is that at this stage there is a problem to provide scenarios for their use. The costs and complexity of creating a COURT seem incommensurable compared with the potential benefits they can bring. At the same time, the simplest scenarios for the use of the COURT are implemented without their presence, and more complex scenarios seem so complicated that the user of the COURT obviously will not be able not only to configure them in the COURT, but even just use them in the familiar interface paradigm. A radical change should be achieved by three new paradigms, which at this stage are practically not used in the COURT:

Paradigm of outsourcing service functions

This paradigm says that the maintenance of the COURT should not be performed by the user independently. Moreover, most likely, it should be prohibited, because the COURT is an extremely complex technical system and cannot be fully serviced even by one specialist, because each of the subsystems requires specific skills and, accordingly, different specialists. In this case, one of the maintenance functions should be the function of customizing the SCO behavior scenarios. And this function should be outsourced, so that by the request of users of the COURT, the specialist could set up the necessary scenario.

Paradigm of intellectualization of management functions

In this paradigm, the COURT should acquire artificial intelligence that will allow it to respond flexibly to situations and ensure the processing of very complex scenarios. In principle, the task is to provide self-study of this AI, in order to automate the scenario design. Thus, an integral part of any project of an ACS should be an AI engine capable, based on external action patterns received from sensors, to form external impact patterns on actuators in such a way as to ensure the adjustment of an ACS to the user's life processes. As a result, the control function should consist of two parts: the algorithms set up by the specialists and the algorithms developed by the AI ​​themselves. In some part they can intersect.

Humanitarian interface paradigm

One of the key problems in the operation of modern IT tools is that the user is forced to adapt to the logic of the PAK, and not vice versa. This particularly applies to interfaces. In the COURT the most natural interface is the issuance of voice commands. It does not require any equipment, allows you to identify the user by voice, is the most natural from the point of view of a person. Thus, a successful COURT must necessarily have in its composition a full-fledged voice interface, which, together with the AI, must form a kind of pseudo-personality with which the user will also associate his AP. All these functions should form the intellectual core, which, in fact, will be a key element of the success of the COURT.

Literature

1. Article on kinfo
2. Publications on Habré