A Systems- and Network Management Framework for Open Home Systems

Contemporary proposals for Home Automation Systems standards in Europe [3, 5, 6] include several data communication protocols and define common objects for control, monitoring and management of home networks. Accordingly, the author proposes two goals for future Home Systems software tools. First, a generic integration framework should be designed that allow network management to converge towards single and heterogeneous management architecture. Second, to ease the use and to lower the requirements on persons involved in development, installation and maintenance of home networks, operational and management models should be the same. This paper proposes to manage various management systems from a generic management framework which is based entirely on CORBA [2]. Benefits of this scheme are a uniform programming model and capability to dynamically manipulate agents at runtime.