The next generation energy information gateway for use in residential and commercial environments

Both the current state of technology as well as emerging trends in home/office automation and energy management necessitate the presence of a piece of software dedicated towards facilitating interoperability amongst heterogeneous components; therefore empowering occupants to manage these spaces more effectively. This paper outlines the software architecture of an Energy Information Gateway, which is the latest evolution of an open source reference design that utilizes a modular software architecture to create an environment where dissimilar communicable components can not only exchange energy related information, but participate in supervisory control efforts. This latest version of the software allows for the abstraction of physical devices into a common standard, thereby allowing unlike components to join the home or office energy network. In addition, the software allows for definitions to be made of the hierarchical relationship between devices in the physical world and for these relationships to be dynamically altered.