ASaP - Integrationsplattform für Smart Services in Intelligenten Umgebungen

Equipping homes with networked sensors and actuators represents an important future trend in Germany. According to recent studies, the total number of Smart Homes in Germany will exceed the one-million mark in 2020. The primary research field of Smart Homes are Intelligent Environments, which focus on all spatial environments providing the user some sort of ambient intelligence and assistance. This thesis addresses the research question, how novel value-added Smart Services can be realised and seamlessly integrated within these Intelligent Environments. Achieving this objective involves two fundamental challenges: • Customers, as residents of a future Smart Home, should be supported by means of a consistent marketplace. This marketplace enables the user to find appropriate Smart Services that fit his current situational and environmental context and to install these services on a central platform. Existing approaches often focus on one dedicated use case and are lacking in a universal and comprehensive interoperability. • The provisioning of tools and development environments is an essential requirement for service providers and developers to achieve an efficient and comprehensive development and deployment workflow for Smart Services. First, this thesis provides an overall concept for integrating Smart Services in Intelligent Environments. The concept comprises existing approaches of the industry standard Universal Remote Console as well as of the reference architecture described in the Smart Service World. Second, a consistent semantic model of the underlying Intelligent Environment is introduced, which forms the basis for the realisation of a concept for personalised user interfaces and of a multi-agent based software platform for integrating interoperable Smart Services. The main focus of the thesis concentrates on the conception, the design and the realisation of an open, highly flexible, expandable and standardised software architecture for Smart Services within the scope of Smart Home technologies.