- The Electronic Meter, responsible for providing certified metering data. The meter shall be interfaced via a new-generation device called Smart Info to enable communication with the telco infrastructure and the household appliances;
- The Smart Appliances, able to cooperate in order to adjust power consumption by modifying their behavior, while preserving the quality of servi
ce and user experience;
- The Smart Plugs, able to collect metering data and to implement a simple on/off control on the plugged energy loads other than Smart Appliances;
- The Home Residential Gateway, which acts as the central coordinator of the entire home. It allows data exchange between the devices operating in the Home Network, in the Home Area Network, and in the Internet;
- The Customer Interfaces, i.e. all the devices used by the customer to monitor and configure his/her energy behavior.
These actors identify the main categories of devices in the Home Domain, without any limitation to the possibility for a device to implement functionalities from more than a category. As an example, an advanced Smart Appliance, provided with a rich user interface, could also implement functionalities typical of a Customer Interface. In the same way, a personal computer might be considered a Smart Appliance from the protocol point of view if it was able to behave like a white good within the HAN.
From a functional point of view, Energy@Home envisions a system that can provide users with information on their household consumption directly on the display of the appliance itself, on the smart phone or on their computer. It is expected that, through easy access to information on consumption and through the possibility of downloading custom applications, consumers will be able to use their appliances in a “smart” way by enhancing the energy efficiency of the entire house system. For instance, Smart Appliances can start functioning at non-peak (and therefore less expensive) times of day as well as they can cooperate to avoid overloads by automatically balancing consumption without jeopardizing the proper execution of cycles.
The project is a further step towards the development of the so-called "smart grid", that, in the future, will allow continuous real-time two-way information exchange between utilities and appliances in the houses to enable each customer to “self-manage” his/her energy behaviors depending on power supply availability and prices.
Energy@Home technical specifications (v 0.95) are available at this link.