Building Automation (BA) and Home Automation (HA) products have been available JQ1 Sigma for several years. Although not in widespread use in personal residences, there are many BA systems currently installed in modern office buildings. Since the investment in BA systems can be relatively high, it would be unreasonable to expect those systems to be discarded and simply replaced by new AmI systems. As a result AmI systems will have to coexist and interact with existing BA and HA systems. In Section 3 we provide a brief description of some of the most commonly used communication standards in the building automation industry.The development of frameworks for AmI and related fields, such as AAL and UbiComp, has been an area of intense research in the last years. As a result several frameworks have been proposed.
In Section 4 we provide a brief description of some of these frameworks.To provide some background on the use of function modules in distributed control systems, the fundamental concepts of IEC 61499 are described in Section 5. In Section 6 we describe the FunBlocks framework and a brief features comparison of the frameworks described is provided in Section 7. Finally, in Section 8, we describe future work that we have planned for the development of FunBlocks.2.?Sensor and Actuator Communications ProtocolsA sensor is a device that receives a stimulus and responds with an electrical signal. The purpose of a sensor is to respond to some kind of an input physical property (stimulus) and to convert it into an electrical signal that is compatible with electronic circuits [6].
There is a wide array of communication protocols developed for use with sensors and actuators. In this section we describe some commonly used protocols.2.1. X-10X-10 is a domotics communication standard introduced in the 1970s. The original X-10 protocol was intended to control devices and thus did not incorporate any means of receiving data from sensors. The protocol was later expanded with the introduction of extended commands to allow its use in sensors. Due to the low cost and wide availability of X-10 based devices this standard still enjoys widespread use.X-10 is a power line based communication standard which employs 120 kHz bursts synchronized with the zero crossing of the power line’s alternating current waveform.
A binary ��1�� is represented by a 1 ms burst near the zero crossing while a binary ��0�� GSK-3 is represented by the absence of such a burst [7].Standard X-10 messages are composed by a Start Code, followed by a House Code and finally a Key Code. The Start Code is Volasertib represented by the unique sequence ��1110��, while House Codes and Key Codes employ complementary pairs for each bit.The House Code is a 4-bit identifier intended to avoid commands destined for one house from activating sensors or actuators in another house.