homeBLOX: making home automation usable

Abstract

Home automation aims to increase convenience of residential living. The homeBLOX system uses a process-driven execution model to enable complex automation tasks with heterogeneous devices, while providing a user interface that abstracts from lower-level complexity. Complex automation tasks are created as sequences consisting of events and actions linked to physical and virtual devices, which are translated into BPEL code for execution. We outline the key concepts, architecture, and prototype of our system.