Domotics, concerned with the realization of intelligent home environments, is a novel field which can highly benefit from solutions inspired by service-oriented principles to enhance the convenience and security of modern home residents. In this work, we present an architecture for a smart home, starting from the lower device interconnectivity level up to the higher application layers that undertake the load of complex functionalities and provide a number of services to end-users. We claim that in order for smart homes to exhibit a genuinely intelligent behavior, the ability to compute compositions of individual devices automatically and dynamically is paramount. To this end, we incorporate into the architecture a composition component that employs artificial intelligence domain-independent planning to generate compositions at runtime, in a constantly evolving environment. We have implemented a fully working prototype that realizes such an architecture, and have evaluated it both in terms of performance as well as from the end-user point of view. The results of the evaluation show that the service-oriented architectural design and the support for dynamic compositions is quite efficient from the technical point of view, and that the system succeeds in satisfying the expectations and objectives of the users.

Pervasive computing environments such as our future homes are the prototypical example of a dynamic, complex system where Service-Oriented Computing techniques will play an important role. A home equipped with heterogeneous devices, whose services and location constantly change, needs to behave as a coherent system supporting its inhabitants. In this paper, we present a fully implemented architecture for domotic applications which uses the concept of a service as its fundamental abstraction. The architecture distinguishes between a pervasive layer where devices and their basic internetworking live, and a composition layer where services can be dynamically composed as a reaction to user desires or home events. Next to the architecture, we also illustrate a visualization and simulation environment to test home coordination scenarios. From the technical point of view, the implementation uses UPnP as the basic device connection protocol and techniques from Artificial Intelligence planning for composing services at runtime.

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