A Reference Model for Smart Home Environment: Functions, Semantics and Deployment

Abstract

Along with the proliferation of smart home solutions, Smart Home Environment (SHE) has been constantly evolving with diverse functions and services to improve households’ living experiences. Consequently, a global view of SHE is desired to represent the characteristics of the ever-changing domain for both solution adoption and innovation purposes. In this paper, we present a reference model of SHE aiming at capturing the environmental characteristics by leveraging the quick evolution pace and the model abstraction level. The reference model consists of three views i.e., functional view, deployment view and ontological view organized following the middle-out methodology. The functional view firstly presents the hardware components and software features necessary to build modern SHE, and then the deployment view and ontological view respectively describe the deployment structure in lower level and the SHE semantics in higher level. The objective is to provide, from a service provider perspective, a common understanding of SHE for household adoption, better industry positioning and research innovation.