Interoperability of Home Appliances: Data Management Working Group - Updated report 2025

This third BRIDGE Report on interoperability of home appliances provides an incremental update on the current state of affairs and activities related to this area within the BRIDGE projects. It also further elaborates on the common view on the issue and presents related external activities.

In the area of energy management in the energy grid, with all its hierarchy levels, the building level is the one where there is still a lot of potential to explore. And especially in the case of unlocking energy flexibility in residential buildings, home appliances constitute the lowest, but probably one of the most important layers of the system. These appliances indeed provide flexibility as they are the basis for successful energy management solutions, like algorithms or systems that monitor and control these appliances. The final result of the combination of these two system layers is closely related to the capabilities of the home appliances, and to the ease with which energy management can approach and exploit these capabilities. In this respect, a broader range of appliances providing flexibility and a harmonised way to monitor and control these, allows wider deployment of energy management systems and increases the available flexibility of the energy systems. Finally, to further increase the impact, trends exist to include devices outside the original definition of home appliances or to combine sectors, as well as to follow a generic approach considering all kinds of buildings with their different controllable devices to offer flexibility.

This report further refines the common ground on the interoperability of home appliances, adding the energy management layer to the considerations. But its main aim is to provide insights from the BRIDGE projects on their approaches, challenges and solutions/products related to the topic of home appliances and the ways these are applied in an energy context. The identification of these products can help the other projects to deal with the problems related to interoperability of home appliances. This third report provides an update to the previous two and compares the outputs from last two years with the current ones. It also extends the scope to the project products and external activities related to home appliance interoperability, and it draws on the next possible subjects to be covered by the DMWG Action #5 Interoperability of home appliances in the following years.