
Chapter 1. Introduction 2
Reuse: Already existing HA devices can be combined and reused. This reduces the installation
time as well as overall costs.
This work presents the integration of two exemplary HA systems, HomeEasy and Intertechno,
to an IE that uses middleware ROS. The implemented software consists of three parts: a driver
which programmatically abstracts the hardware to the middleware, a database container for storage
and mapping, and a graphical visualization program which provides a namespace service. As a
result, HA systems can be controlled via easily understandable ROS interfaces without the need
of detailed knowledge of communication parameters, such as protocol timings, package handling
and address mapping. The result of this work has been tested in an office and home scenario and
evaluated by various benchmarks.
The challenge faced in this project was to adapt the software to the special characteristics of
each supported HA system in order to allow as many systems as possible to be contolled without
compromising special functions. Since these systems may differ generally, difficulties may arise
when developing a storage class and functions for interconnection.
1.2. Outline
Chapter 2 covers the basics for all software and hardware parts of this work and presents other
projects with similar goals to provide an overview of current research projects.
Chapter 3 deals with the concepts and ideas of the process of integrating HA in IE. The software
and hardware used are presented and the abstraction chain and storage class are discussed in more
detail. Finally, a requirement analysis outlines the demands for the following software layers.
Chapter 4 deals with the implementation of the concepts as presented in the chapter 3. It consists
of two parts: Firstly, the used gateway and the changes that were undertaken to adapt it to this
work are introduced. Secondly, the different software parts and their interactions are examined.
Chapter 5 deals with the evaluation of the complete system. Two test scenarios are described,
one office and one home environment as well as various simulations for testing the performance
of the system.
Chapter 6 summarises this paper.
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