A Smart Home Development Tool combining Simulation, Emulation and Real-World IoT

Intelligent smart homes will offer context-aware, personalized and adaptive services to users. These services range from simple remote control to fully automated / autonomous actions based on user context and adaptive behaviour. However, in science it is difficult to study smart homes and their embedded smart objects, because laboratory environments are costly and time consuming to create. This paper proposes a simulator with built-in emulator capabilities. It integrates smart home simulation and emulation capabilities into one device. In this way, smart home implementation models exist either as pure software or as a mixture, where the software part gradually moves into the physical object processing unit. Thus, early in the development phase simulation runs in software and later as a thin client communicating with the real world objects running their own embedded software. The proposed approach reduces the complexity, cost and time to construct laboratory environments early in development phase.