Furthermore, AmI systems can be viewed as an evolution of Home Automation (HA) and Building Automation (BA) systems.Despite Sorafenib Raf-1 the many advantages for everyday living offered by AmI and HA technologies there has not been a widespread offer or demand of AmI or HA products. Although HA has been available to consumers since the 1970s, it has not been adopted in such a wide scale as, for example, cellular phones. Probably the main reason why HA technology has not enjoyed wider demand are the difficulties users encounter when trying to bring this technology to their daily lives and the lack of a standardized means of interaction with the devices. In [5] Bernheim et al. surveyed 14 households which employed HA.
They found four major challenges people face when deploying and using such systems: high cost of ownership, inflexibility, poor manageability, and difficulty achieving security. In other words, HA systems are not currently ��user friendly��.Current AmI systems are also not ��researcher friendly��. After more than a decade of considerable research the field has not yet matured to the point of enabling incremental research. Much of the research effort still seems devoted to the creation, very often from scratch, of new technologies and systems [1]. Ambient Intelligence is a highly multi-disciplinary field which involves communications, control systems, electronics, artificial intelligence, human-computer interfaces, distributed systems and others. However there is not a common set of tools which researchers from different disciplines can use to contribute to the field of AmI research.
To address these issues we are developing FunBlocks, a minimalist modular framework for the development of AmI systems. FunBlocks is based on the function module abstraction used in the IEC 61499 standard for distributed control systems. Through the use of function modules FunBlocks promotes component reuse which allows researchers Anacetrapib from different fields to easily apply previous results in new developments.FunBlocks is also targeted at the development of commercially viable AmI systems. Using FunBlocks system integrators can develop highly customizable AmI systems where end users can add new functions with a degree of difficulty analogous to hooking up a common home appliance or installing a new program on a computer.
As mentioned previously, AmI systems require the use of sensors and actuators both to obtain information about the environment and to adjust this environment to the user’s needs. There are many different sensor and actuator communications protocols available for AmI systems. It is a desirable feature for an AmI system to considering be able to handle many different types of sensor and actuator communication protocols since this provides added flexibility to the system and also because in many instances such sensors and actuators may already be installed in a given environment.