Industry-friendly engineering tools for wireless home automation devices

Although home automation (HA) systems in the wired domain are widely accepted by consumers, in today´s industry, the mega trend is steering HA systems along a wireless way. Theoretically, wireless solutions are able to provide HA systems with more flexibility and thus reducing engineering costs. In practice, however, deploying wireless HA systems actually requires more costs and efforts due to the lack of versatile software tools to support the whole engineering process. This paper defines and evaluates the engineering workflow and architecture for home automation systems. The proposed architecture is studied and implemented based on web technologies and graphical configuration environments, with the aim of reducing workloads of HA engineers at every stage. A prototype has been implemented to demonstrate the technical feasibility of the proposed architecture.