In recent years, the smart home field has gained wide attention for its broad application prospects. However, families using smart home systems must usually adopt various heterogeneous smart devices, including sensors and devices, which makes it more difficult to manage and control their home system. How to design a unified control platform to deal with the collaborative control problem of heterogeneous smart devices is one of the greatest challenges in the current smart home field. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a universal smart home control platform architecture (IAPhome) based on a multi-agent system and communication middleware, which shows significant adaptability and advantages in many aspects, including heterogeneous devices connectivity, collaborative control, human-computer interaction and user self-management. The communication middleware is an important foundation to design and implement this architecture which makes it possible to integrate heterogeneous smart devices in a flexible way. A concrete method of applying the multi-agent software technique to solve the integrated control problem of the smart home system is also presented. The proposed platform architecture has been tested in a real smart home environment, and the results indicate that the effectiveness of our approach for solving the collaborative control problem of different smart devices.

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The parallel system is a kind of scientific research method based on an artificial system and computational experiments, which can not only reflect the dynamic process of the real system but also optimize its control process in real time. Given the rapid development of wind energy technology, how to shorten the development and deployment cycle and decrease the programming difficulties of wind energy conversion system (WECS) are major issues for improving the utilization of this form of energy. In this paper, the Data Engine is used as a computing environment to form a parallel WECS for studying the engineering application of WECS. With the support of the programming methods of graphical component configurations, visualization technology and dynamic reconfiguration technology, a maximum power point tracking (MPPT) computing experiment of the parallel WECS is carried out. After comparing with MATLAB simulation results, the parallel WECS is verified as having good performance. The Data Engine is an ideal computing unit for modeling and computation of the parallel system and can establish a parallel relationship between the artificial system and the real system so as to achieve the optimal control of WECS.

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