To aid in its fight against climate change, the EU has awarded EUR 2.3 million to the POBICOS ('Platform for opportunistic behaviour in incompletely specified, heterogeneous object communities') project, which aims to get energy-saving applications into people's homes.

The three-year project is led by the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and involves partners from all across Europe. Together, this group will develop a platform which will make it possible to simply add energy-saving applications to homes. Scientists working on the project envision that this could be as simple as putting a sticker on a door.

The aspirations of the POBICOS project are made all the more possible thanks to recent advances in low-power electronics, miniaturisation and wireless communications. These developments have finally made it possible to embed sensing, actuating and computing functionality into everyday objects. Yet, although these functions exist in some devices, their full potential has yet to be tapped. This is because it is difficult to programme such object collections in a straightforward way.

This is why the project aims to develop technologies that will enable programmers to develop portable applications that can be deployed in a simple way, and harness the resources available in different operational settings.

What this means is that the applications which are to be developed by programmers will be able to automatically exploit whatever opportunities exist at a given time. This follows an opportunistic behaviour pattern; in computing terms is referred to as opportunistic pervasive computing. In practice, this would mean that in order to minimise energy consumption of battery-powered nodes, all processing-intensive tasks could be automatically transferred to nodes with ample energy supply and appropriate computing resources.

This computing application would be packaged in a deployment unit called an 'Application Pill'. This 'pill' can be activated by the user at any point in time. Once activated, the software spreads the application's micro-agents to the objects with the suitable resources found in the environment.

This ability to be deployed anywhere and at any time is important for many different application areas. Such functionality could also play a particularly crucial role in boosting application development for the major industries which provide the facilities and appliances in the first place. If such technologies could be embedded when these facilities and appliances are first developed, the energy savings could be exponential.

The project will place particular emphasis on customising the platform for the area of home and building automation. The application of this technology in the home environment would play a particularly crucial role in reducing energy consumption.

The middleware developed by POBICOS will be integrated with hardware devices. Proof-of-concept applications will then be deployed and tested in a bioclimatic building using various sensors and actuators.

The sensors will measure key environmental parameters, such as temperature, humidity and luminosity, and the actuators feature controllable elements. Regular objects such as blinds, windows, air-conditioning units, lighting and refrigerators equipped with sense-compute-actuate embedded nodes may be included.

POBICOS

Source: Community R&D Information Service (CORDIS)