Pia Stoll

A responsibility-based pattern language for usability-supporting architectural patterns

Usability-supporting architectural patterns (USAPs) were developed as a way to explicitly connect the needs of architecturally-sensitive usability concerns to the design of software architecture. In laboratory studies, the Cancellation USAP was shown to significantly improve the quality of architecture designs for supporting the ability to cancel a long-running command, sparking interest from a large industrial organization to develop new USAPs and apply them to their product line architecture design. The challenges of delivering the architectural information contained in USAPs to practicing software architects led to the development of a pattern language for USAPs based on software responsibilities and a web-based tool for evaluating an architecture with respect to those patterns.

Scheduling residential electric loads for green house gas reductions

Active House is a concept developed by a large collaboration of actors from the automation and power industry and research institutes in Sweden. The frame is the Stockholm Citys Royal Seaport city development area which focuses on sustainable development and extensive CO2 reductions. The residential building is called an “Active House” since it has active interaction between the electricity consumer and the utility. The active interaction aims at reducing utilization of electricity production with high CO2 emissions and includes customer-controlled post-shift and reduction of the consumers electricity loads and local electricity production using Solar PV systems. This paper presents the Active House collaboration, the household incentives to participate and its energy management system used to shift and reduce electric loads, and also discusses the hourly CO2 emission model and some of its simulation results for the Swedish and the United Kingdom power system.

Designing an Active House deployment architecture for residential electricity customers' active interaction with the smart grid

The increased focus on reduction of greenhouse gas emissions can be achieved in part by interactively integrating residential electricity production from renewable resources while giving customers incentives to shift and reduce electricity consumption during times of production with high CO2 emissions. In this paper we present the Active House deployment architecture in the smart grid, which has been designed based on open standards. Instrumental to the design of the deployment architecture are the Royal Seaport Smart Grid sustainability and environmental requirements; the impact of these requirements on the Active House deployment architecture is discussed. We discuss the standards of relevance for the Active House project including information on ongoing standards work. We demonstrate the proof-of-concept of the applicability of the architectural solution by referring to the results of an industrial demonstrator that was exhibited at the ELFACK congress in May, 2011.

Active House: Industrial demonstrator

In this paper we present the Active House industrial demonstrator, exhibited at the ELFACK fair (May 2011), which demonstrates the role of home/building automation systems in energy management at home. Moreover, we introduce the Active House deployment architecture in the smart grid that provides the basis for the industrial demonstrator. We discuss the demonstrator as the proof-of-concept that allows us to evaluate the applicability of the architectural solution and validate whether the Active House architecture can provide the right starting point for integrating the Active House into the grid.

Usability supporting architecture pattern for industry

Traditionally software qualities as e.g. performance have been considered important to implement early in the software system architecture. The usability quality implementation has been done late or, if considered early in the software architecture, then often as a separation between presentation and execution layers. However there are usability concerns requiring early implementation in the software architecture not solved merely by separation. Usability supporting architecture patterns (USAPs) have been shown to provide developers with useful guidance for producing an architectural design that supports usability for these concerns, [1]. This experience report introduces the USAPs in an industrial context.