Domotics also known as home automation or smart homes is a field within building automation specializing in the specific automation requirements of private homes and in the application of automation techniques for the comfort and security of its residents. Although many techniques used in building automation (such as light and climate control, control of doors and window shutters, security and surveillance systems, etc.) are also used in home automation, additional functions in home automation can include the control of multi-media home entertainment systems, automatic plant watering and pet feeding, automatic scenes for dinners and parties, and a more user-friendly control interface.
The goal of this scenario is:
The provision of use case where designers have to model the location and the physical conditions features of a context-aware system for an UCE
Therefore,
Suppose that you have to design a system that is capable of keeping the intensity of the light inside a room within a predefined range, avoiding the use of artificial light as much as possible (for energy saving reasons).
Concretely the room is equipped with electrical blinds. These blinds are capable of being commanded by a Bluetooth connection from any mobile device. To set up the desired intensity of light of the room users have to be into the room. The user clicks on the light controller and sets light intensity for the room the user is into. Thus, the system automatically sets blind position according light intensity set up by the user.
The Figure 27 depicts the situation where we can observe two main tasks to be performed by the system:
- Acquiring information from the user about desired light intensity of the room and delivering it to the devices that have the responsibility for controlling it. In this particular case, we represent only the case of the blinds that «controls» natural light intensity into the room (i.e. for room RoomA, blinds Blind1-3). However it is easily extensible to artificial light too. This task is represented by the SetLightIntensity
- The factor that affects the room light intensity (i.e. RoomA) is the position of the blinds (i.e. Blind1-3). This task is represented by the GetLightIntensity
You can reference this work as:
Ricardo Tesoriero, José A. Gallud, María D. Lozano and Víctor M. R. Penichet. CAUCE: Model-driven Development of Context-aware Applications for Ubiquitous Computing Environments. Journal of Universal Computer Science, Vol. 16, No. 15, pp. 2111-2138. 2010. Link: http://www.jucs.org/jucs_16_15/cauce_model_driven_development