In the current era of IoT, home appliances like dishwashers, washing machines, and coffee makers, etc. are being equipped with internet access and sensing resources to provide autonomous or semi-autonomous functionality to its users. It is foreseeable that these appliances will soon be capable to collaborate by sharing their capabilities enabling dynamic operations as per the context and user preferences. This scenario, however, will also add to the complexity of programming/customizing the operational behavior of the appliances. Hence, traditional control interfaces will not suffice. This paper presents a generic architecture through which such collaborative operations of home appliances can be achieved. To minimize complexity for end-users, a centralized drag-n-drop visual interface for operational customization of the home appliances has been presented. In this proof-of-concept implementation, Intel Edison Platforms with associated sensing and actuating components have been utilized to mimic the sensing, actuation and computational resources of future home appliances by utilizing local WIFI network for communication purposes. Simple collaboration scenarios have been executed to find the execution delay of the customized collaborative operations. Based on the same scenarios, a preliminary usability study, based on system usability scale (SUS), has been conducted for the centralized visual interface via two different groups of end-users (programming skills-based). The average SUS score of 79.2 by both groups backs the claim of reduced complexity and ease of use for the end-users.

在当前的物联网时代，洗碗机，洗衣机和咖啡机等家用电器正在配备互联网访问和感应资源，以为其用户提供自主或半自主功能。可以预见，这些设备很快将能够通过共享其功能来实现协作，这些功能可根据上下文和用户喜好进行动态操作。但是，这种情况也会增加对设备的操作行为进行编程/自定义的复杂性。因此，传统的控制接口将无法满足要求。本文提出了一种通用体系结构，通过它可以实现家用电器的这种协同操作。为了最大程度地降低最终用户的复杂性，已经提出了用于家用电器的操作定制的集中式拖放可视界面。在此概念验证的实施中，具有相关联的感应和驱动组件的英特尔爱迪生平台已被用于通过利用本地WIFI网络进行通信来模仿未来家用电器的感应，驱动和计算资源。已执行简单的协作方案以查找定制协作操作的执行延迟。基于相同的方案，已经通过系统可用性量表（SUS）通过两个不同的最终用户组（基于编程技能）对集中式可视界面进行了初步的可用性研究。两组的SUS平均得分均为79.2，这证明了最终用户降低了复杂性并简化了使用的要求。