Web-Based Digital Habitat Ecosystems for Sustainable Built Environments

Abstract

This chapter introduces the Digital Ecosystem (DE) concept and its application in the home environments. DEs are clusters of distributed and diverse digital components, which interact with each other in a self-organising, scalable, and sustainable manner. This could be viewed similar to the interaction of living organisms in a biological ecosystem. The DE concept has traditionally found widespread use in the business environments. However, the concept can well be applied to the home environment, giving rise to the concept of Digital Habitat Ecosystem (DHE). Thus a DHE refers to a cluster of devices for measurement, control, and sensing of environment parameter with the help of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The primary incentive behind this chapter is to show how the DHE concept can be used for maximising the utilisation of vital resources, such as water and electricity, in the home environment and leading to a more sustainable living. Furthermore, the work outlined in this chapter proposes Digital Habitat Ecosystem Architecture (DHEA), which integrates the various digital elements of a home network in a holistic manner. However, there are some current digital system architectures such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) available these days; this chapter discusses the shortcomings of the SOA architecture and how the proposed DHEA will rectify the same. In addition, this chapter gives an overview of the static web based model of the home management system, how dynamic DHE varies from those existing models.