Dependable communication middleware for residential electrical installations

The liberalization of the energy market is opening numerous novel opportunities to the domestic consumer (e.g. quick reaction to energy price changes). Technological support is needed to ensure that changes do not remain at a theoretical level. Service Oriented Programming is the basis of one of the most successful technologies of the recent past: Web Services (WS). They support the integration at enterprise level in the global Internet era. However, the enterprise level applications are only part of the spectrum, the other being the ever growing ubiquitous embedded applications. Arguably, WS offer the same advantages at embedded system level. In the following, we propose a categorization of electrical devices and a dependable ICT middleware solution, based on the concept of WS, for the communication in the new intelligent electrical residential installations.