Support of Embedded Hardware Equipment Facilitated by a Smartphone Application

Abstract: In today’s situation more and more tasks are carried out with the help of smartphones. The chosen research area is the improvement of support for advanced embedded equipment through the use of a smartphone application. This report addresses the issue of supporting a door lock system called Hi-O (Highly Intelligent Opening), developed by ASSA ABLOY. It is significantly harder to support an advanced door lock system than it is to support a traditional, mechanical system. The installation and service of the Hi-O system can be made easier by being able to directly access the information in the Hi-O system and change its configuration. The research question answered in this report is “how can a smartphone application facilitate support of an intelligent door lock system, focusing on the design of a software architecture?”. The practical contribution of this research is a prototype for the smartphone application, called Aioli. The theoretical contribution is the architecture along with many empirical findings that are relevant for years to come. This smartphone application will make a considerable improvement compared to how installation and service of the Hi-O door lock system are carried out today. Through defining requirements, designing the architecture and developing a prototype the foundation for the support system Aioli was laid. The Design Research method that was used allowed several architectural evaluations to be carried out using the “architectural Software Quality Assurance" method. Evaluation of the architecture was conducted in collaboration with engineers at ASSA ABLOY. The Aioli prototype was developed for the Android platform and implements a selected part of the requirements specification. Findings show that the specified architecture design is feasible for the support of the Hi-O door lock system. From the evaluations of the prototype it became clear that a product like Aioli is desired.