Automation Configuration in Smart Home Systems: Challenges and Opportunities
Sheik Murad Hassan Anik, Xinghua Gao, Hao Zhong, Xiaoyin Wang, Na Meng

TL;DR
This paper investigates the challenges users face when configuring automations in smart home systems using YAML, revealing common issues and the limited effectiveness of current analysis tools, and suggests directions for future improvements.
Contribution
The study provides a detailed classification of YAML automation issues in smart homes and evaluates existing tools' effectiveness, highlighting gaps and future research directions.
Findings
68% of issues are related to debugging YAML automations
Existing tools detect at most 14 issues and fix none
Users face significant challenges in creating correct automations
Abstract
As the innovation of smart devices and internet-of-things (IoT), smart homes have become prevalent. People tend to transform residences into smart homes by customizing off-the-shelf smart home platforms, instead of creating IoT systems from scratch. Among the alternatives, Home Assistant (HA) is one of the most popular platforms. It allows end-users (i.e., home residents) to smartify homes by (S1) integrating selected devices into the system, and (S2) creating YAML files to control those devices. Unfortunately, due to the diversity of devices and complexity of automatic configurations, many users have difficulty correctly creating YAML files. Consequently, their smart homes may not work as expected, causing frustration and concern in users. This paper presents a novel study on issues of YAML-based automation configuration in smart homes (issues related to S2). We mined the online…
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Taxonomy
TopicsIoT-based Smart Home Systems
