The european home systems protocol: concepts and products

Abstract

Energy cost savings, security of persons and goods, comfort improvement are some of the benefits of Home Automation. Energy cost savings are achieved thanks to temperature management depending on presence and type of rooms, automatic adaptation of power consumption to tariff rateslighting management. Security of persons and goods is increased with functions such as detection of fire of gas leakage, transmission by telephone of alarm or detection of intrusion. Increasing of quality of life brings new facilities for elderly, in-house distribution of entertainment and services, remote control by telephone of heating and lighting. To achieve all these new services, home appliances, connected on different communication media, have to communicate to exchange messages in a structured way following a communication standard. This is the purpose of the European Home Systems protocol. Born in 1992 by the publishing of a comprehensive specification for an open communication protocoldedicated to Home Automation, European Home Systems (EHS) has now entered a mature phase: hardware and software products exist and major European companies involved in white and brown goods and major European utilities have decided to include the EHS protocol in their products. This article describes the environment in which EHS has been developed, lists the different requirements issued from market studies for home automation. It explains the technical concepts answering these requirements leading to the PLUG & PLAY concepts. Then, this article briefly describes the software and hardware components available to develop an EHS application.