Domotics is the technology for developing and implementing the automation of common installations in a building or a house. Energy saving, safety, comfort and communications are its main goals. There are many different the domotics products and architectures such as centralized, decentralized, and distributed. They involve in use of technology in the electronics field, computation and telecommunications.
However, they increase of the domotics installations since their origin is lower than expected. Some reasons for this low rate are:
• The existing domotics variety products
• The difficulty end users can find in their management
• The complexity in their design, programming and further maintenance
• Their functionality sometimes does not match with that demanded by the potential users
Several convergence criteria such as Konnex, SCP, and OSGI have been formulated as the solutions to the lack of standardization in most of the existing domotics systems. The main characteristics a domotics system must have for general acceptance are:
• It must be simple and friendly interface with the user
• It must be possible the remote access to the system
• The modification of its features must not be painful
The research group has worked out a solution oriented to spread the implementation of the domotics systems. This solution is based on the web technologies and industrial programmable controllers (PLCs). Some software tools have been developed:
• SIMATICA: this tool allows configuring all domotics functions and generates automatically the required information for implanting the system such as architecture, electrical schemes, control programs, components, manual of use, estimates, etc.
• SIMAWEB: this tool obtains the domotics project information from a database generated by SIMATICA, it generates automatically web pages for the remote handling and supervision of the domotics system. The SIMAWEB user can be used personal easily the screens of the domotics installation.