SmartHomeML: Towards a Domain-Specific Modeling Language for Creating Smart Home Applications

There is an increasing demand for smart home connectivity from controlling the home temperature, to switching light bulbs, controlling the window shades and pet feeders. Smart home control systems such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home provide user interfaces to coordinate the operation of several home appliances. While this facilitate integrating the operations of several appliances, system integrators still need to specify and define the integration and communication logic. This logic depends on both the appliance and the control system providers. This paper introduces SmartHomeML, a domain specific modelling language for smart home applications, that allows users to define new skills (functionalities). SmartHomeML consists of a model designer that supports modelling smart home applications and a model generator that uses template-based transformation to automatically generate smart home device adapters and connectors that conform to the specification of a selected target home control system. We show through an example how to use SmartHomeML to model a smart home service independently from the target smart home provider and then generate Amazon Alexa Skill Adapters and SmartThings SmartApps automatically.