Sophia Antipolis, 3 April 2014

ETSI’s SmartM2M Technical Committee has launched the development of a standard for communication between Smart Appliances. The future standard will be based upon ETSI’s functional architecture for Machine to Machine communications, and will include a common data model and the identification of communication protocols.

In the future, domestic or industrial energy using and producing products, also called appliances, will not be stand-alone systems anymore. They will be highly intelligent, networked and smart devices, which form complete energy consuming, producing, and managing systems. One of the requirements for making such systems commercially successful and widely adopted, is that they can be extended over time according to the needs and budget of the user. Such systems will therefore consist of devices from different vendors added at different points in time, with open interfaces enabling further extension. These systems will also need to be able to communicate with service platforms from different energy service providers. ETSI’s proposed standard will take account of these requirements and will ensure interoperability through the integration with ETSI’s M2M architecture.

In coordination with this initiative, the European Commission has just launched a “Study on the available semantics assets for the interoperability of Smart Appliances; Mapping into a common ontology as a M2M application layer semantics” (SMART 2013/0077), which will provide input to the ETSI work.

An open workshop jointly organized by the European Commission’s DG CONNECT and ETSI on Smart M2M Appliances will take place in Brussels on 27-28 May, to outline ETSI’s objectives, to present the scope of the European Commission’s study, and to receive feedback and input from industry and stakeholders. All interested parties are invited to participate and further information can be found on ETSI website.