Smart services for home automation. managing concurrency and failures: New wine in old bottles ?

Home automation represents a growing market in the industrialized world. Today´s systems are mainly based on ad hoc and proprietary solution, with little to no interoperability and smart integration. However, in a not so distant future, devices installed in our home will be able to smartly interact and integrate in order to offer complex services with rich functionalities. Realizing this kind of integration push developers to increase the amount of abstraction within the software architecture. In this paper we give a high-level view of what are the inherent trade-offs that stem from this process of abstraction and suggest how they could be tackled in these complex home automation systems. More specifically we focus our analysis on two problems: concurrent execultion of multiple plans and failure detection.