Many user studies of home automation, as the most familiar representative of the Internet of Things, have shown the difficulty of developing technology that users understand and like. It helps to state requirements as largely-independent features, but features are not truly independent, so this incurs the cost of managing and explaining feature interactions. We propose to compose features at runtime, resolving their interactions by means of priority. Although the basic idea is simple, its details must be designed to make users comfortable by balancing manual and automatic control. On the technical side, its details must be designed to allow meaningful separation of features and maximum generality. As evidence that our composition mechanism achieves its goals, we present three substantive examples of home automation, and the results of a user study to investigate comprehension of feature interactions. A survey of related work shows that this proposal occupies a sensible place in a design space whose dimensions include actuator type, detection versus resolution strategies, and modularity.
It is also possible to view home automation in terms of high-level actions that must be completed over time @cite_5 . In the remainder of this section, however, we turn to the more typical approach to the Internet of Things, in which actuators can change settings at any time (as described in ).
@cite_5
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Technology to support care at home is a promising alternative to traditional approaches. However, home care systems present significant technical challenges. For example, it is difficult to make such systems flexible, adaptable, and controllable by users. The authors have created a prototype system that uses policy-based management of home care services. Conflict detection and resolution for home care policies have been investigated. We identify three types of conflicts in policy-based home care systems: conflicts that result from apparently separate triggers, conflicts among policies of multiple stakeholders, and conflicts resulting from apparently unrelated actions. We systematically analyse the types of policy conflicts, and propose solutions to enhance our existing policy language and policy system to tackle these conflicts. The enhanced solutions are illustrated through examples.