My household has fully bought into the “smart home” craze. With my smart thermostat, I can set my home temperature from anywhere. My doorbell camera allows me to monitor my front stoop for package drop-offs without ever leaving my office chair. Smart light bulbs in my living room lamps can be easily programmed to turn on with the setting sun and turn off after the sun rises.
But one thing has always bothered me about my smart home devices: the number of apps needed to control them. The Ring spotlight camera in my backyard doesn’t use the same app as the Reolink doorbell at my front door. My Google Home app is capable of controlling my thermostat and smart plugs, but it can’t control the LED string lights in my sunroom — those are controlled by the Govee app. Certain appliances in my home — like my robot vacuums, dishwasher, and white noise machines — each have their own app. Needing a specific app for each smart device is the opposite of smart.
Launched by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), Matter — an open-source interoperability standard — aims to simplify the smart home experience by ensuring that devices play nicely together, regardless of brand. With major industry players like Amazon, Apple, and Google embracing the standard, you could theoretically buy any device and use your preferred voice assistant or platform to control it.
The first batch of Matter-supported smart home gadgets hit the market in 2022. Today, more than 7,000 devices are listed as Matter-certified on the CSA website. For now, the functionalities supported by Matter include on/off, start/stop, and other basic commands — like setting the temperature on a thermostat. Although the Matter standard still has a long way to go before seamless functionality is possible across smart devices, for those interested in building or expanding their smart home, adopting Matter-certified devices can provide greater flexibility across brands and platforms.
In the field of process automation, major players are trying to pull off something similar — a standards-based, interoperable, and secure process automation architecture. The Open Process Automation Forum (OPAF) consists of 110 member organizations, including end-users and vendors of instrumentation and control systems. The OPAF’s O-PAS Standard will enable the integration of components from multiple vendors, allowing industrial facilities to use a mix of hardware and software components without being tied to a single vendor. Testbed projects to validate the OPAF approach are underway at companies like BASF and ExxonMobil (see CEP Sept. 2020, pp. 45–51), but industry-wide adoption of the O-PAS Standard will take time.
In his article on pp. 27–31, Stefan Basenach (ABB) discusses the future of process automation. Automation vendors are evolving to meet changing demands, rising energy costs, shifting regulations, and sustainability goals. The future of process automation will depend on concerted industry efforts to make control technologies more open and readily interoperable, believes Basenach.
Just as Matter aims to simplify the smart home experience, the OPAF seeks to break down silos in process automation. While both standards have a long road ahead, they represent a fundamental shift toward flexibility, ease of use, and user control. Their success will depend on how well they evolve and how quickly the market embraces them.
Emily Petruzzelli, Editor-in-Chief
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