The Smart Home, delivering advanced services to its occupants for using energy efficiently or providing support in sickness and old age, among many others, is on the verge of becoming a reality. Smart Home services are supported by innovations in the intelligence of appliances that interact with their owners at home and away from it. They are complex distributed systems that must coexist and interact to work together, i.e. to interoperate, exchanging information and using it with confidence that there is a shared understanding of its meaning.
The assurance of interoperability has been a major concern for designers, implementers and installers of Smart Home systems since their inception. It is manageable for packaged, professionally designed, installations but, in the future, when intelligent appliances are the norm and are installed by consumers without expert guidance, interoperability must be guaranteed when they take the product out of the box and turn it on.
The objective of this CWA 50560:2010 IFRS for an Interoperability Framework Requirements Specification is to provide a methodology that will support that guarantee.
CWA 50560:2010 IFRS
This CWA states the necessary requirements that devices, objects and systems must comply with in order for them to be capable of interoperability and introduces new metrics of interoperability in IFRS conformant systems. Four basic levels of interoperability have been identified that correspond to the current state-of-the-art, from none at all to the interoperability supported by present-day, largely custom designed and engineered, systems. The IFRS establishes three further levels of 'open' interoperability that enable systems to be constructed dynamically, by both professionals and consumers:
The CWA provides an Interoperability Implementation Conformance Statement (IICS) proforma for the Conformance Clauses in the IFRS specification (Annex B). The IICS is based on ICS approaches established by ISO for protocols and services, and extends models used already by the home and buildings automation control industry. It details in tabular form the implementation options additional to those that are mandatory to implement.
In summary, this document will support interoperability for stakeholders implementing systems in the Home Systems market. CWA 50560:2010 IFRS will allow the designer of interoperable applications for the Smart Home to work more effectively and with clear understanding of the wider issues related to interoperability.