Interoperability for Smart Appliances in the IoT World

Household appliances are set to become highly intelligent, smart and networked devices in the near future. Systematically deployed on the Internet of Things (IoT), they would be able to form complete energy consuming, producing, and managing ecosystems. Smart systems are technically very heterogeneous, and standardized interfaces on a sensor and device level are therefore needed. However, standardization in IoT has largely focused at the technical communication level, leading to a large number of different solutions based on various standards and protocols, with limited attention to the common semantics contained in the message data structures exchanged at the technical level. The Smart Appliance REFerence ontology (SAREF) is a shared model of consensus developed in close interaction with the industry and with the support of the European Commission. It is published as a technical specification by ETSI and provides an important contribution to achieve semantic interoperability for smart appliances. This paper builds on the success achieved in standardizing SAREF and presents SAREF4EE, an extension of SAREF created in collaboration with the EEBus and Energy@Home industry associations to interconnect their (different) data models. By using SAREF4EE, smart appliances from different manufacturers that support the EEBus or Energy@Home standards can easily communicate with each other using any energy management system at home or in the cloud.