Configuration and Mass Customization of...

In the recent years, smart home systems and components, also known as domotics, have been literally mushrooming. Today hundreds of different systems are available on the end-consumermarket. However, because of the difficulty for the end-consumer tooverlook the variety of products, the percentage of real smart homes(fully equipped and not only characterized by the presence of singlesmart components) is far behind the estimations. A related problemis that off-the-shelf products cannot be easily installed and requirethe support of professionals.The latter, often working in small and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs), have to deal with the situation of having to install productsof their own portfolio in heterogeneous technical infrastructures, and,increasingly, combine them with products from doubtful origin. Dueto a lack of compatibility/interoperability of smart home systems,this can constitute a big challenge. Even minimal standards, suchas those present in other fields of ICT (e.g. USB connectors), arenot existing in the domotic area. These and other problems finallyled to a still weak penetration of smart home technology. However,there are ways to overcome the problems involved, one of them isMass Customization in Combination with Configuration presented inthis paper. The approach is applied within the Interreg funded projectMass Customization 4.0 (MC 4.0) and aims at designing (mass) customized solutions for domotic systems based on configuration technology