Quick reference manual

Running environment

A smart home environment framework that has the ability to trigger, process and forward sensor changes. Can be either a simulation or an actual smart home.

Framework / System

An abstraction in software sense, in this case it means a system that provides functionality needed for capturing, building, reasoning and managing smart home.

Smart home / Home

A actual running environment, contains one or more real human, sensors, and objects.

Simulation:

A running environment that behaves like a actual smart home.

Program / Algorithm

A set of logic that is runnable within framework, for reasoning the information relative to a smart home, and take actions if necessary.

Side(s)

A term indicates several programs within same framework, they are running at several different running locations, and each program at a location is called a side.

Simulation side / Home side / Smart home side / Smart home environment

A side that contains running environment.

Changes / Notifications

A piece of information indicates either a sensor, or a object state changes from A to B, and A is not equal to B.

Object

Any objects within the running environment, It can be funiture, part of the room, human, a part of human, and more.

Sensor

A sensor can monitoring one or more object(s) state change(s) in realtime and report to system.

Physics / States

The physical condition of an object. It can be changed triggered by actions, time, and more with prerequisite satisfied.

Human / User

Human is a party that can issue actions therefore impact object states.

Human factor / Human potential / Human condition / Human characteristic

A characteristic of human that does not change in short amount of time. For example weight, height, medical conditions.

Note: If you are looking for human characteristic that change through time or actions, make it an object, and use object state instead.

Program / Algorithm

A set of logic that can reason what happened in smart home environment, and take appropriate actions if necessary.

Program side / Algorithm side

A side that reason and logic for smart home environment, includes receiving new changes, reasoning, and taking actions if necessary.

Actual state / Current state

An object state indicates the physical state of an object.

Note: Compare with observe state, it is always correct. Compare with processing state, it is always current.

Sensor state / Observation state / Observation

An object state observed by a sensor state. Depend on sensor success rate, sensor may or may not capture the last change of object correctly, so it may be wrong therefore different from actual state.

Processing state / Logic state

A state that should be used to logic with by the program. Depend on program processing speed, it may or may not be catch up to speed with human actions. If the program is one step behind, it is equal to actual state. If more than one step behind, it does not.

Sensor success rate / Sensor rate

The probability of sensor successfully capture changes. For example 0.9 means the sensor capture new change that its watching 90% of times, and the rest 10% of time fail to report changes, for whatever reasons (design flaws, temperature, lighting...).

The success rate should be bigger than 0, and smaller or equal to 1.

Tick / Program tick / Program iteration

One iteration of the program. The program will be wake up, has access to processing state, and put to sleep when finish. The process from wake up to sleep, and all logic contains within this timeline is called one tick / one iteration.