Supporting Composite Smart Home Services with Semantic Fault Management

The proliferation of smart home technologies providing home users with digital services presents an interoperability problem. This paper asserts that the value of these services can be greatly extended by enabling technology-neutral compositions of these home services, and furthermore that the reliability of such composite services will be of paramount importance to ensuring widespread deployment. Therefore fault management capabilities must accompany the composition capabilities in order to increase the robustness and reliability of such services. This paper proposes a web services-based abstraction layer for home area network service composition and a semantically informed fault management system for composed services, which can assist in diagnosis and correction of problems with composite services in smart homes of the future. Prototyping work and use cases are also described and initial metrics are presented that investigate the overhead of introducing the technology neutral abstraction layer.