The Internet of Things (IoT) has witnessed remarkable advancements, enabling smart homes with user-centric features. To effectively articulate their personalized needs, it becomes crucial to equip end users with programming capabilities. Currently, the executable Trigger-Action Programming (TAP) rules have become the mainstream paradigm for IoT end-user programming. To simplify the creation of TAP rules, many studies have proposed various levels of requirements abstraction, yet the connections between them remain unclear. In this article, we employ a mixed-methods study to identify the preferred way of expressing end users’ requirements in practical scenarios. Subsequently, from the perspective of requirements engineering, we categorize the needs of smart home into three hierarchical levels of abstraction. Accordingly, we propose an innovative multi-level requirements description language called SH-RDL . We also address potential challenges and conduct an evaluation to validate SH-RDL ’s usability, understandability and error-prevention. This will aid in the broader adoption of IoT end-user programming.

The rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) technology makes smart homes a reality, where many user-centered service scenarios are yet to be built. For such applications, it is of utmost importance to let end users express their needs easily on the one hand, and these users’ expectations can be interpreted by the smart home systems accurately on the other hand. Unfortunately, existing requirements languages are not for end users to express their needs in daily terms. An easy but expressive requirements language is required. This paper carries out a survey on suitable and expressive requirements description language for smart homes. Based on the results, a user requirements description language Smart3E is designed for enabling end user expressions. This paper also puts forward the challenges that are needed to be addressed when allowing end users to express their needs freely in smart home domain.