Hi everybody, welcome to the introduction of DYAMAND. On the agenda of this session is first of all, the context of DYAMAND, the problem it's trying to solve, a number of possible solutions that are out there, and the vision of DYAMAND. After that, we also have a couple examples of real life usage of DYAMAND. As we see in today's world, there's a trend toward ever more connected devices. A few decades ago only computers were connected, but they were soon followed by entertainment devices, such as gaming consoles and TVs. And we see that this trend not only occurs in the entertainment sector, but also in for example, The white goods sector. Sensors are becoming commonplace, and we see gadgets popping up daily. The problem with this is that these devices are not compatible out of the box. There are a number of different standards that industry made. In one application domain and across application domains even more of them exists. Moreover, when we look at one standard, even two device that implement the same standards might not be compatible due to implementation quirks in one of the two devices. To make matters worse, companies might resort to proprietary protocols to speed up development and time to market for new products. In this slides, I show you a number of example of such technologies. This is only a limited subset of all the possible technologies. There are hundreds of them, so it's impossible to list them all. The problem there exists is that all these technologies differ slightly. Some of them use the same communication channel, for example, UPnP and the. They both use IP as communication channel, as opposed to, for example, enocean, Z-wave, and ZigBee. They use radio frequency to communicate their events. But even if they use the same communication medium, there are still differences in the way the services are discovered, models, and controls. Now, this is a real problem whenever you start a project using connected devices. Not only do you need to define the requirements you have for the project, you need to define the devices you need. You need to search for relevant technologies. And the problem integrators have is that development cost rises exponentially with each technology to integrate into a new product or application. Now, how can we solve this as an application developer? First of all, we can reinvent the wheel, make our own better technology. This is okay for the short term, but makes the overall problem worse in the long term. Now the second way to solve this is by ignoring the problem and picking one technology. But the problem with this is that we effectively have a vendor lock-in. So this strategy is typically used by powerful companies, for example, Apple. Now the two other ones are solutions that first of all, admit there's a problem. In the first one, the pragmatic interoperability, the application developer chooses a number of technologies to support based on a number of parameters they choose. The problem with this is that you only reach a limited part of the market. Now the last one, the true interoperability, we want to support every technology imaginable, but that's incredibly hard to achieve. Now the vision of Dyamand is exactly to achieve this true interoperability. So it aids to provide a flexible software component to support everything out there that can be integrated in applications, so the developers of that applications can focus on their business logic without having to worry about the problems I mentioned before in this session. As a last topic of this session, I show you a number of applications that DYAMAND has been used in the past to get a better grip on what DYAMAND is. So first of all, a number of years ago at Eye Minds, we had an energy usage application that was developed in a project that simply measured energy usage on desks and other devices. The problem here was that in the beginning of the project, there was a company called Plogg, that developed smart plugs. But during the project, that company went bankrupt. So another solution had to be found. And the solution was PlugWise, but it was completely incompatible with Plogg. So to be able to support application you saw in the previous slide, additional effort needed be invested into supporting that new technology. The problem with this is that the application was tightly intertwined with the support hole Plogg. And the developers of that application decided to use DYAMAND instead. So they rearranged their application to use DYAMAND and took advantage of being able to use both Plogg and PlugWise in the same installations. In that way, they also could extend their existing installations without any additional effort. A second example we have is actually a project we did within AIT. In this project, we wanted to monitor the occupancy of meeting rooms. We actually did this in corporation with Smart Science, a partner within that project who had an application that visualized this occupancy information. And in the slides, we actually have a quote by Smart Signs that mentions that by using DYAMAND, they could easily extend their application to use a new technology, namely EnOcean. And not only does this flexibility add flexibility towards the devices, so the EnOcean technology, but also towards the application of Smart Signs in that they didn't have to change their application at all. They just could use extra sensors in their existing application. Now as conclusion of this session, I want to reiterate on what we saw. So first of all, we mention there's a rise in connected devices but there's a interoperability problem when using them. And as a last step, we said that DYAMAND aims to solve this problem by providing a flexible software component that can be integrated into applications for application developers to use.
