Electrigence: Electrical distribution networks with added Intelligence for Home/Office Automation and Control

Homes and offices with smart devices/appliances are soon becoming a reality leading to comfort and automation. The heterogeneity of devices is a critical hurdle in the developing of a system that enables integration and centralized control. Significant literature is available in the area of automation and control of high-end devices and appliances. The nature of the work being proprietary and specific to the application of high-end devices has prevented integration and automation of lower-end devices on a single unified platform – that serves as a common point for control and acquisition of data. We propose “Electrigence” or ElectricalIntelligence a concept that utilizes local (office and home) power distribution grids as a basis for home/office automation. The concept of Electrigence has two prominent features. Firstly, it provides for a unified software platform and vastly simplified hardware that enables the control of devices in home and office environments. Secondly, Electrigence provides a communicative environment that enables the control as well as processing of information in devices both at a local (intra-office, intra-home) and a global (Internet) level. The concept enables local electrical distribution networks to emulate an operating system behavior, and further allow the coalescing of heterogeneous devices over the electrical distribution network. We examine the concept of Electrigence in this paper. A simulation study examining scalability, protocol features as well as service provisioning over the framework is also presented.