An android multi-protocol application for heterogeneous building automation systems

According to the Internet of Things, the future home, the so-called Smart Home, will be a seamless integration of physical smart objects, interacting among them and with the surrounding environment. Moreover, since, nowadays, mobile devices are used to manage many aspects of people´s lives, the capability to control and manage Smart Homes through them will become a primary requirement. Unfortunately, the technologies for Smart Homes are often not interoperable among them and the implementation of mobile applications dedicated to these technologies is quite hard for non tech-savvy users. So, in this paper, we propose a flexible approach that allows to efficiently manage, through an Android terminal, a building automation system composed of heterogeneous smart devices. Our solution is based on the capability to semantically describe both the application structure and the device functionalities. Leveraging such a description, the GUI and the business logic of the application is automatically built and configured without any technical and programming knowledge. Moreover, an easily-extensible multi-protocol gateway is integrated in the application, so as providing a transparent access to the heterogeneous underlying technologies. The effectiveness of the proposal is evaluated through a real use case in which heterogeneous devices are involved.