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Introduction

Smart Appliances

Currently, household appliances are responsible for about two thirds of the energy consumed by buildings. Industrial appliances are also major energy users.

In the future, domestic and industrial appliances will be intelligent, networked smart devices, forming complete energy consuming, producing and managing systems, based on the integration of products from different vendors and vertical industrial sectors. The need for all these connected appliances to be able to communicate among themselves and with the service platforms needs to be addressed. This requires open interfaces. Interoperability is thus a key factor in creating an IoT ecosystem, and the availability of a standardized solution, along with related test suites, will be the essential enabler of the Internet of Things (IoT).

Smart appliances include white goods, heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems and storage systems.

To ensure such systems are technically and commercially successful – and widely adopted – it must be possible to combine appliances from different vendors. These systems will also need to be able to communicate with service platforms from different energy service providers in order to manage and control energy use.

The EC, as a first step, identified an immediate need of the current market to reduce the energy utilization by managing and controlling Smart Appliances (for example, in a house or an office building) on a system level. In particular, the Industry and the EC raised the need for a common architecture with standardized interfaces and a common data model to assure interoperability. Without these two components, the current market would continue to be fragmented and powerless. Therefore, the development of a reference ontology was targeted as the main interoperability enabler for appliances relevant for energy efficiency.

From Smart Appliances to Smart Applications

Smart Appliances REFerence ontology (SAREF V1) was common to 3 domains (Energy, Environment and Buildings), the first core of SAREF (mapped into 3 applications’ domains) has been improved (SAREF V2, then V3) to enable mapping of SAREF with more Smart Applications domains (Smart City, Smart Industry and Manufacturing, Smart Agri-Food, Automotive, eHealth and Ageing-Well, Wearables, Smart Water, Smart Lift…). Like this SAREF became Smart Applications REFerence ontology (core SAREF) with its domain mapping extensions.

Our Role & Activities

ETSI Smart Machine-to-Machine communications Technical Committee (TC SmartM2M) actively supports the oneM2M global initiative, especially in relation to European Commission (EC) driven activities, bridging the EC’s needs in the M2M/IoT area and the technical work in oneM2M and other ETSI activities.

Our TC SmartM2M focus is on an application-independent ‘horizontal’ service platform with architecture capable of supporting a very wide range of services including smart metering, smart grids, eHealth, smart cities, consumer applications, car automation, smart appliances and Smart Applications (SAREF).

Initially, Smart Appliances have been specified on request of EC DG Connect. The Smart Appliances specifications were based on the oneM2M communication framework (TS 103 267) complemented with Smart Appliance REFerence (that is now Smart Applications REFerence, SAREF V3 TS 103 264) ontology. SAREF work has contributed to the foundations of the base ontology of oneM2M Release 2.

TC SmartM2M developed “SAREF ontology and oneM2M Mapping standards” and Smart Appliance testing standards. For SAREF extension investigation in the energy domain (TS 103 410-1), direct input from EEBus and Energy@home has been included in TC SmartM2M developments where Energy, Environment and Building sectors have been  part of normative work. Then more SAREF extensions were developed for Smart City, Industry and Manufacturing, Smart Agri-Food, Automotive, eHealth and Ageing-Well Wearables and Smart Water. SAREF for Smart Lift is under construction.

From Smart Meters, Smart Appliances, Smart Energy Grids to Smart Applications, SAREF is recognized as key enabler of IoT Semantic Interoperability with a growing set of enabling published standards (search ETSI standards with the keyword SAREF).

Official ETSI portal for SAREF

The official ETSI portal for SAREF contains pointers to the SAREF ontologies and SAREF-related work items.

Related Committees
SmartM2MoneM2M