HGI, the leading global organisation for publishing requirements for the Smart Home, has recently met both the EnOcean Alliance and the ULE Alliance to explore current trends and case studies within the Smart Home.

Luca Giacomello, HGI Chairman and Project Manager at Telecom Italia, recently attended the EnOcean Alliance meeting 2014 in Italy and presented a keynote speech on the HGI approach to Smart Home services along with Telecom Italia’s experience. The EnOcean Alliance is a leading technical alliance in the green building sector. The organisation aims to internationalise the EnOcean energy harvesting wireless technology and is dedicated to creating interoperability between the products of OEM partners.

“The Smart Home is now a very important consideration for telco operators both now and for the future,” said Giacomello. “This is why it is important for us to develop a gateway-centric architecture including the definition of an abstraction layer to be used as reference by the applications developers and clarify requirements for Home Area Network technologies to help reduce the time to market for smart home solutions for operators. We are working with other digital and smart home   technology groups to do this with the aim to truly enable a worldwide approach for making this service vision achievable.”

HGI also recently met with the ULE Alliance to present similar messages to the combined operator and manufacturer community. The ULE Alliance promotes the worldwide allocation and market adoption of the ULE technology, the leading control network eco-system for home and building use. The meeting provided an opportunity for constructive discussion on technology adoption for main use cases in the smart home such as energy management, security and comfort and home automation.

In May 2014 HGI, after recognising the need for guidelines in this area, published a landmark document HGI-RD048, titled HG Requirements for HGI Open Platform 2.0 . At the EnOcean meeting, Mr Giacomello presented the Telecom Italia approach for its first smart home development, which is based on HGI’s requirements included in the Open Platform 2.0 specification.

“Software modularity is the key architectural enabler for the main use cases,” continued Giacomello. “This has been one of HGI’s main areas of focus, alongside the smart home, home networking and home gateway testing. By working together with our colleagues in other technology groups we can increase the coexistence between different technologies integrated into a complete ecosystem managed by the home gateway”

HGI will host its next quarterly meeting in Aveiro, Portugal between 30 September and 3 October 2014. For information about attending, visit: http://www.homegatewayinitiative.org/.