Remote maintenance and development of home automation applications

This work studies methods and technologies for remote maintenance and development of home automation applications. A major problem in remote home automation configuration seems to be the missing information concerning the properties and attributes of the home's automation hardware. This study defines methods and a prototype to describe the automation hardware remotely for developer along with further methods to use to deliver these descriptions to the developer. A review is done of the traditional automation technologies and automation networking. Local Operating Network automation technology and networking methods are studied more deeply, while the prototype presented in this work used this technology. The aspects of modern home automation are reviewed and studied. This includes crucial technologies for this work like residential gateways. A few description technologies for describing automation platform are examined. These include XML, databases and JavaBeans. On the basis of evaluation XML is chosen due to its compactness and simplicity. Furthermore distributed computing technologies are presented which include the Jini concept. This distribution technology is utilised in communication between homes and application developer. The required XML structures are defined for device description purposes and other prototype software for residential gateway and developer's client are defined. The residential gateway software is described with UML and the software was implemented using the Java programming language due to its good networking abilities. On the basis of this work it was seen that is possible to describe the home's automation platform and deliver the descriptions for use of the remote developer. Especially XML was seen as very suitable for this purpose and the Jini distribution concept was also seen suitable for delivering this and other maintenance and development services to the remote developer.