Taxonomy-driven prototyping of home automation applications: A novice-programmer visual language and its evaluation

Abstract

Home automation environments are dedicated to helping users in their everyday life and are being deployed in an increasing number of areas, including home security, energy consumption, and assisted living. The range of situations to be addressed makes the development of home automation applications challenging: it requires to manage heterogeneous entities with a wide variety of functionalities. Moreover, since this area covers a large spectrum of user needs, it is crucial to ease the development and the evolution of these applications. This paper presents Pantagruel, an expressive and accessible approach to integrating a taxonomical description of a home automation environment into a visual programming language. A taxonomy describes the relevant entities of a given home automation area and serves as a parameter to a sensor-controller-actuator development paradigm. The orchestration of area-specific entities is supported by high-level constructs, customized with respect to taxonomical information.We have implemented a visual environment that integrates a taxonomical approach in the development of orchestration rules. Furthermore, we have developed a compiler for Pantagruel and successfully used it to test applications in various areas related to orchestration development for the domain of home automation. Finally, we have successfully evaluated the usability of Pantagruel through a user study performed with eighteen novice programmers.

Visual Simple Transformations

“…For example, the output of a security camera can be displayed on a nearby screen. Pantagruel is a high-level visual language for programming home automation applications [Drey and Consel 2012]. This language allows end-users to place conditions on sensors and trigger an actuator when a condition is realized.…”

Evaluation of programmable domestic eco-systems

“…Il a été sous-estimé dans AppsGate. TeC [46] et Pantagruel-DiaSuite [20], qui incluent des outils de vérification formelle, sont bien armés pour des déploiements en conditions réelles.…”

Towards the Evolution of Smart Home Environments: A Survey

“…Other solutions, such as those provided by Drey and Consel [102], Luque et al [103], Camacho-Guerrero and Macedo [104] and Mardanbegi and Hansen [105], focus on bringing visual environments, similar to the actual house, in order to help users to define actions and monitor events. Such environments are helpful to identify the location of sensors and actuators inside the architecture of the house and to determine how such devices interfere with their daily actions.…”