Based on the Smart Energy Platform, it is possible to integrate more than 3,500 different smart devices across multiple vendors, such as intelligent measuring systems, light control and heating thermostats, which are equipped with sensors and actuators. Their services can be used in combination on the platform. Widely used communication protocols such as HTTP, WebSockets, MQTT and CoAP are supported for data transfer between smart devices and the platform. By providing lightweight and flexible connectors, entire networks (e.g. smart home hubs based on ZigBee or Z-Wave), existing smart home platforms (e.g. openHAB), individual devices (e.g. smartphones) or Maker-projects based on Raspberry Pi or Arduino microcontrollers can be connected and virtually displayed. Depending on the communication protocol used, it is possible to automatically find new smart devices within networks and register them on the Smart Energy Platform. This is how the configuration and administration effort is kept to a minimum. A convenient device management also ensures that you can keep track of your smart devices, which means for example to organize and manage them in order to assign them to rooms or other logical units.

Smart devices can capture and transfer a large amount of data in a short time. But how can this data be used in form of information for both users and companies? The Smart Energy Platform offers a powerful and expandable analysis environment for this purpose. This enables evaluations of large amounts of data in real-time as well as on the basis of historical data, e.g. for aggregations. In addition, data from different sources can be networked together to perform correlation analyses. In this context, event detection rules can also be defined and applied to data streams to recognize changing environmental conditions. Thus the Smart Energy Platform not only provides isolated information, but also allows conclusions to be drawn about entire contexts.

To tap the full potential of the combined use of smart devices, the Smart Energy Platform offers the possibility to network and control these through processes. Processes are chains of events, rules, decisions and services whose execution serves a specific purpose (e.g. home automation). A graphical tool is provided, which allows simple or even more complex automated processes to be designed via “drag & drop” without the need for programming skills.  For example after evaluating the recorded sensor data, the gained information can be used for the sequence control of a process and hence trigger actions on basis of this knowledge (e.g. switching light and heating on/off).