Tech talk – home appliances and interoperability

Home appliances constitute the lowest layer of flexibility in the energy system but arguably they also are one of the most important layers.

Connected home appliances are proliferating as interests in smart homes grow with consumers becoming more energy conscious and manufacturers bringing ever more advanced models and control systems to the market.

As a barometer of this trend, no less than 13,000 industry attendees at the 2024 CES (Consumer Electronics Show) have listed smart home and appliances as one of their business interests and almost two-thirds of the attendees from the smart home industry are senior level executives.

And as a favoured opportunity for new product launches, as an example Samsung, long at the forefront of the trend, is expanding its SmartThings Energy home energy management platform with a service integration with Tesla as well as harnessing latest generation AI in new products including the next generation family hub smart refrigerator and robotic vacuums.

Home appliances

For flexibility and energy management in the home a range of appliances can potentially be involved, ranging from smart lighting and white goods to heating and cooling technologies such as HVAC and space and water heating and increasingly with their growing uptake rooftop PV, battery storage and electric vehicles.

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Coupled with these is the need for control systems such as sensors and smart plugs and thermostats, along with a management platform with algorithms either locally or in the cloud.

Clearly the success of such delivery is related to both the capabilities of the home appliances as well as the ability to approach and exploit these capabilities, with a common form of control across a broader range of appliances allowing wider deployment of energy management systems and increasing the available flexibility – in short, that there is interoperability among appliances and systems.

Interoperability status

What then is the status of achieving interoperability of home appliances?

To investigate this the European Bridge project surveyed 18 projects (the number that responded) on the use of the appliances and their energy related features. Of these HVAC was the most common appliance type (in 11 projects), followed by white goods, PV inverter, energy storage and EV charger, and all but one of the projects involved two or more appliance categories.

Moreover almost all the appliances were from many manufacturers and the majority of them, over three-quarters, are available in the market.

When it comes directly to addressing interoperability, there are many different approaches followed by the projects, although most tend to create a form of interoperability layer, the Bridge survey found.

This is for instance realised by using as many as possible available standards, using data concentrators, creating custom gateways, using drivers/(interoperability) adapters, or relying on an existing solution – approaches that focus on the interaction down to the appliances.

There are also other approaches for achieving this layer that seem rather to focus on the energy management and the interfaces offered. These include proposing a canonical information model, implementing a semantic interoperability framework and developing a common information model (CIM).

Other approaches again seem to follow a more monolithic approach, where the control algorithms are simply adapted to the protocols offered by the appliances.

On the question regarding the specific framework used by the project to achieve the interoperability goals, the answers tended to mention projects’ own solutions. Some of these were developed over some project generations, while also there were some commercial and open-source solutions.

Another notable finding was that the most common aggregation was at the local level, followed by the cloud then the building and the neighbourhood. Some projects also combined some or all of the levels.

Project scopes and next steps

Overall, the survey found that the projects are on different stages of addressing the issue of home appliance interoperability, mainly as a result of different project scopes and different stages of progress.

Not all of the projects are focussed mainly on interoperability, however, but for those that are it is crucial to investigate their outcomes and make them available, so that the interoperability clients can benefit, the BRIDGE report states.

It is also important to identify and approach the stakeholder groups relevant for the interoperability of home appliances, such as manufacturers and energy managers. The requirements of and for these groups should be named and evaluated.

Specific actions the BRIDGE initiative plan for the coming years are:
● Identification of relevant outcomes/products from the projects, creating a library/repository with the products generated by the projects related to home appliance interoperability, including descriptions for comparison, potential reuse by others, etc.
● Identification and monitoring/supporting activities towards harmonisation/standardisation in this area
● Identification and monitoring of relevant standards and solutions, including creating a list and description of standards related to home appliance interoperability, together with their characteristics
● Creating a multi-class smart appliance database with list of energy related features and interfaces.