Service-oriented architecture for smart environments

The advances of pervasive technology offer new standards for user comfort by adding intelligence to ubiquitous home and office appliances. With intelligence being the core of some newly constructed buildings, it is important to design a scalable, robust, context-aware architecture, which not only has enough longevity and evolving capabilities to sustain itself over the building's lifetime, but also provides enough potential for additional features to be added to the core Building Management Systems (BMS). Such features may include energy preservation system, or activity-recognition techniques. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles provide great tools that can be applied to the smart buildings design, however certain specifics of pervasive systems should be taken into account, such as high heterogeneity of available devices and capabilities. In this paper we propose an architecture for smart pervasive applications, which is based on SOA principles and is specifically designed for long-term applicability, scalability, and evolution capabilities of a BMS. We validate our proposal by implementing a smart office on the premises of the Technical University of Eindhoven and showing that it complies with the requirements of scalability and robustness, at the same time being a viable BMS. © 2013 IEEE.