As more and more digital appliances populate our homes, networking them to form a home automation (HA) system not only becomes an option, but almost a necessity. While comfort, security, and energy efficiency can be provided by many existing systems, they all remain complex islands that are difficult to expand and customize. We propose Internet technology to remedy the situation and to become the future solution for HA. For this, we analyze the feasibility of today's Internet technology with regard to traditional HA solutions. Furthermore, we present two case studies that substantiate the benefits of our proposal. As we will show, with IPv6 and 6LoWPAN, a single network serves the classical as well as emerging aspects of HA while concepts from the Web provide benefits for both, developers and users.

Rising global energy demand, increasing electricity prices, and the limitation of natural resources has led to increased thoughts on residential energy consumption. A necessary step towards energy conservation is to provide timely and fine-grained consumption information. This allows for users to identify energy saving opportunities and possibly adjust their behavior to conserve energy. In this paper, we present a device-level energy monitoring system that is based on off-the-shelf components and enables users to monitor, control, and compare the electricity consumption of their appliances. By providing a RESTful API, we seamlessly integrate the smart power outlets into the web and facilitate the development of extensions and novel features. We demonstrate this through the implementation of a web user interface and a mobile phone interface. We further confirm the suitability of our approach with the help of a 12 months pilot deployment. The results of a questionnaire provide insights into additional user features and the interviews conducted with developers who used our open sourced system illustrate the usefulness of the RESTful approach for the smart energy domain.

The increasing usage of smart embedded devices in business blurs the line between the virtual and real worlds. This creates new opportunities to build applications that better integrate real-time state of the physical world, and hence, provides enterprise services that are highly dynamic, more diverse, and efficient. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approaches traditionally used to couple functionality of heavyweight corporate IT systems, are becoming applicable to embedded real-world devices, i.e., objects of the physical world that feature embedded processing and communication. In such infrastructures, composed of large numbers of networked, resource-limited devices, the discovery of services and on-demand provisioning of missing functionality is a significant challenge. We propose a process and a suitable system architecture that enables developers and business process designers to dynamically query, select, and use running instances of real-world services (i.e., services running on physical devices) or even deploy new ones on-demand, all in the context of composite, real-world business applications.

The increasing usage of smart embedded devices is blurring the line between the virtual and real worlds. This creates new opportunities for applications to better integrate the real-world, providing services that are more diverse, highly dynamic and efficient. Service Oriented Architecture is on the verge of extending its applicability from the standard, corporate IT domain to the real-world devices. In such infrastructures, composed of a large number of resource-limited devices, the discovery of services and on demand provisioning of missing functionality is a challenge. This work proposes a process, its architecture and an implementation that enables developers and process designers to dynamically discover, use, and create running instances of real-world services in composite applications.

Advances in the areas of embedded systems, computing, and networking are leading to an infrastructure composed of millions of heterogeneous devices. These devices will not simply convey information but process it in transit, connect peer to peer, and form advanced collaborations. This ``Internet of Things'' infrastructure will be strongly integrated with the environment, and its integration with the enterprise systems will not only further blur the line between business IT systems and the real world, but will change the way we design, deploy, and use services. New opportunities can emerge for businesses, which can now closely collaborate with the real world. The work presented here proposes an architecture for an effective integration of the Internet of Things in enterprise services.

Modern enterprises operate on a global scale and depend on complex business processes. Business continuity needs to be guaranteed, while changes at the shop floor should happen on-the-fly without stopping the production process. Unfortunately, the existing business processes found in most enterprises are not modular enough, nor they have dynamic support from the device level. However, as the number of sophisticated networked embedded devices in the shop-floor increases, SOA concepts can now be pushed down and provide a better collaboration between the business systems and the production line. This leads to highly dynamic systems that can adapt and optimize their behavior to achieve their goals. The work presented here shows directions to achieve this dynamism by means of simulation, state identification and close coupling of real world and business systems.

It is expected that future shop-floors will be populated by thousands of networked embedded devices. Those will not only communicate using IP (as in TCP/IP), but also feature some autonomy, allowing them to collaborate among themselves and with enterprise systems. As they can offer both their mechatronic and higher-level functions as a service and support dynamic deployment of new code, they can execute business logic locally, allowing for new classes of business processes that are executed collaboratively by back-end and embedded systems. While some parts of a process will still be executed in the data centre, the rest will execute directly on embedded devices on the shop-floor. Business Process execution will therefore be more dynamic and context-based.We introduce an approach to manage efficient business process execution over such highly dynamic infrastructures.

This paper presents a concept that enables consumers to access and share product recommendations using their mobile phone. Based on a review of current product recommendation mechanisms it devises a concept called APriori. APriori leverages the potential of auto-ID-enabled mobile phones (barcode/RFID) to receive and submit product ratings. Since mobile users cannot be expected to have the patience and time to compose text-based reviews on mobile phones, we introduce a new rating concept that allows users to generate new rating criteria. The concept is tailored to the limited attention and input options of mobile users in real-world environment. This work describes the architecture, implementation, and evaluation of APriori. For an evaluation we have taken the approach of interviewing 26 users in the frames of a formative user study, with the goal to further improve the system for an application in the real world. In addition, the paper discusses open issues regarding community-based product recommendations on mobile phones and proposes solutions.

In the era of ubiquitous devices and mobility, we increasingly carry objects of great value (in terms of data, money or emotions). Because of our increased mobility, we are also more inclined to lose these objects. When it comes to finding them again, current lost property offices seem rather inflexible and not fully adapted to our nomad lives. They lack dynamic information, introduce too many intermediates and induce high costs. We support the growth of a community of users able to solve the problem on their own using their mobile phones. We describe our concept and implementation of the idea based on prototypes of mobile phones enhanced with a novel type of RFID (Radio Frequency IDentifiaction) reader, the use of the EPC (Electronic Product Code) standards and the creation of both mobile and server-side software. We finally discuss how it can help making the current system more dynamic and efficient.

This paper reviews the challenges associated with the development of tangible and multimodal interfaces and exposes our experiences with the development of three different software architectures to rapidly prototype such interfaces. The article first reviews the state of the art, and further compares existing systems with our approaches. Finally, the article stresses the major issues associated with the development of toolkits allowing the creation of multimodal and tangible interfaces, and presents our future objectives.