Introduction
Smart Appliances
Household appliances are responsible for about two thirds of the energy consumed by buildings. Industrial appliances are also major energy users.
Domestic and industrial appliances become intelligent, networked smart devices, forming complete energy consuming, producing and managing systems, based on the integration of products from different vendors and vertical industrial sectors. All these connected appliances are able to communicate among themselves and with the service platforms. This required open interfaces. Interoperability is thus a key factor in creating an IoT ecosystem, and the availability of a standardized solution, along with related test suites, it is an essential enabler of the Internet of Things (IoT).
Smart appliances include white goods, heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems and storage systems.
To ensure such systems are technically and commercially successful – and widely adopted – it must be possible to combine appliances from different vendors. These systems also need to be able to communicate with service platforms from different energy service providers in order to manage and control energy use.
The EC, as a first step, identified an immediate need of the current market to reduce the energy utilization by managing and controlling Smart Appliances (for example, in a house or an office building) on a system level. In particular, the Industry and the EC raised the need for a common architecture with standardized interfaces and a common data model to assure interoperability. Without these two components, the current market would continue to be fragmented and powerless. Therefore, the development of a reference ontology was targeted as the main interoperability enabler for appliances relevant for energy efficiency.
From Smart Appliances to Smart Applications
Smart Appliances REFerence ontology (SAREF V1) was common to 3 domains (Energy, Environment and Buildings), the first core of SAREF (mapped into 3 applications’ domains) has been improved (SAREF V2, V3, V3.2.1 in 2024 and soon V4) to enable mapping of SAREF with more Smart Applications domains (Smart City, Smart Industry and Manufacturing, Smart Agri-Food, Automotive, eHealth and Ageing-Well, Wearables, Smart Water, Smart Lift, Smart Grid, Smart Maritime…). Like this SAREF became Smart Applications REFerence ontology (core SAREF) with its domain mapping extensions.
Our Role & Activities
ETSI Smart Machine-to-Machine communications Technical Committee (TC SmartM2M) actively supports the oneM2M global initiative, especially in relation to European Commission (EC) driven activities, bridging the EC’s needs in the M2M/IoT area and the technical work in oneM2M and other ETSI activities.
Our TC SmartM2M focus is on an application-independent ‘horizontal’ service platform with architecture capable of supporting a very wide range of services including among others, smart metering, smart grids, eHealth, smart cities, consumer applications, car automation, smart appliances and Smart Applications (SAREF).
Initially, Smart Appliances have been specified on request of EC DG Connect. The Smart Appliances specifications were based on the oneM2M communication framework (TS 103 267) complemented with Smart Appliance REFerence ontology that is now Smart Applications REFerence ontology:
SAREF V3.2.1 TS 103 264). SAREF work has contributed to the foundations of the base ontology of oneM2M Release 2.
Funded by EC/EFTA, TC SmartM2M is developping a European Standard (EN 303 760) SAREF Guidelines for IoT Semantic Interoperability to develop, apply and evolve Smart Applications ontologies.
Designed for Smart Applications, SAREF is recognized as key enabler of IoT Semantic Interoperability with a still growing set of enabling published standards (search ETSI standards with the keyword SAREF).
Official ETSI portal for SAREF
The official ETSI portal for SAREF contains pointers to the SAREF ontologies and SAREF-related work items to allow an open access to SAREF.