Management of intelligent spaces and buildings: a distributed and hierarchical model

Three years ago in Portugal, a private company (DomoCiber) and two departments of two public universities (Minho and Oporto) initiated a co-operative project :to produce a commercially available system for the management of intelligent spaces and buildings (IS&B). This system would improve the paradigm of IS&B in new trends. The paper describes the main features of the results of this work, which is already present in the market. Namely, the authors outline some aspects such as standardisation, compatibility, open systems, friendly user interfaces and a programming language.