Smart home platform supporting decentralized adaptive automation control

Smart Home is an exemplar application domain of the Internet of Things (IoT). In particular, smart home automation processes that manage the interactions with the home devices and integrate all their (possibly interfering) services, introduce new challenges and call for modern engineering practices, software platforms, and computational intelligence. A key example is the need to achieve a more efficient integration between design and runtime aspects in the automation process, taking into account that unanticipated situations can occur in the home environment and require a smart home system to deal with them at runtime. In this paper, using an application example, we foresee how to architect future smart home systems in order to endow them with self-adaptation capabilities allowing decentralized control and device interconnection. Namely, we propose to exploit feedback control loop architectures (e.g., composite MAPE feedback loops) to design and manage the home automation processes, as alternative software architectural solutions to those of smart home platforms currently available.