SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE SYSTEM WITH EMBEDDED VIRTUAL ROUTER

• US 20080104212A1
• Filed: 12/10/2007
• Published: 05/01/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 06/09/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Whirlpool Corporation
• Original Assignee: Whirlpool Corporation
• Inventors: McCoy, Richard, Ebrom, Matthew, Glotzbach, Mark
• Granted Patent: US 8,621,049 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 709/222
• CPC Class Codes: A47L 15/0063 using remote monitoring or controlling of the dishwasher operation, e.g. networking systems
• CPC Class Codes: D06F 34/04 Signal transfer or data transmission arrangements
• CPC Class Codes: D06F 34/28 Arrangements for program selection, e.g. control panels therefor; Arrangements for indicating program parameters, e.g. the selected program or its progress
• CPC Class Codes: G04G 7/02 by radio
• CPC Class Codes: G04R 20/26 the radio signal being a near-field communication signal
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3495 for systems
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/54 Interprogram communication
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/06 Resources, workflows, human or project management; Enterprise or organisation planning; Enterprise or organisation modelling
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 12/2803 Home automation networks
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 12/2807 Exchanging configuration information on appliance services in a home automation network arrangements for maintenance or administration involving network analysis for automatically determining the actual topology of a network H04L41/12; hardware or software tools for network management using graphical user interfaces H04L41/22; address allocation H04L61/50
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 12/2814 Exchanging control software or macros for controlling appliance services in a home automation network arrangements for maintenance or administration involving configuration of the network and network elements H04L41/08
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 12/2818 from a device located outside both the home and the home network access arrangements H04L12/2856; for remote control or remote monitoring of applications H04L67/025; arrangements for transmitting signals characterised by the use of a wireless eletrical link G08C17/00; telephonic communication systems adapted for combination with remote control systems H04M11/007
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 12/282 based on user interaction within the home receiver circuitry for displaying additional information being controlled by a remote control apparatus H04N21/42204
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 12/2823 Reporting information sensed by appliance or service execution status of appliance services in a home automation network device-related reporting H04L43/065; arrangements in telecontrol or telemetry systems for selectively calling a substation from a main station, in which substation desired apparatus is selected for applying a control signal thereto or for obtaining measured values therefrom H04Q9/00
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 12/2825 Reporting to a device located outside the home and the home network access arrangements H04L12/2856; for remote control or remote monitoring of applications H04L67/025; telephonic communication systems adapted for combination with telemetering systems H04M11/002
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 12/2827 Reporting to a device within the home network; wherein the reception of the information reported automatically triggers the execution of a home appliance functionality
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 12/2832 Interconnection of the control functionalities between home networks single bridge functionality H04L12/4625
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 2012/285 Generic home appliances, e.g. refrigerators
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 63/105 Multiple levels of security
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/12 specially adapted for proprietary or special-purpose networking environments, e.g. medical networks, sensor networks, networks in vehicles or remote metering networks
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 69/26 : Special purpose or proprietary protocols or architectures network applications for proprietary or special purpose networking environments H04L67/12
• CPC Class Codes: H05B 6/688 : for thawing
• CPC Class Codes: Y02B 40/00 : Technologies aiming at improving the efficiency of home appliances, e.g. induction cooking or efficient technologies for refrigerators, freezers or dish washers
• CPC Class Codes: Y02D 10/00 : Energy efficient computing, e.g. low power processors, power management or thermal management

Abstract

The invention relates to a network system of at least two appliances, each appliance configured to perform a cycle of operation on an article, and each appliance having its own software architecture. An embedded virtual router enables communication among appliance components independent of the architecture of the software.

Claims

9. An appliance configured to perform a physical cycle of operation on an article comprising at least two software components collaborating with each other by a method of access or exposure to each other, characterized by:

an embedded virtual router encapsulating the at least two software components, whereby the embedded virtual router is configured to facilitate the collaboration with less dependence on the method.

10. The appliance of claim 9 wherein the dependence is eliminated.

11. An appliance having a software architecture configured to perform a physical cycle of operation on an article wherein the software architecture comprises:

at least one embedded client in collaboration with at least one embedded component, and

an embedded virtual router that encapsulates the at least one embedded component whereby the collaboration is uniform and identical whether the collaboration is over a network or sharing a runtime environment.

12. The appliance of claim 11 wherein one of the software components is part of a hardware abstraction layer.

13. The appliance of claim 11 wherein the appliance is selected from a group including refrigerators, cooktops, dishwashers, dryers, and clothes washers.

14. A network comprising:

a first component having a first software operating environment and application logic, and

a second component having a second software operating environment and application logic wherein the first component has identification and routing information encapsulated from the application logic,

whereby the application logic in the first component can invoke a function of the second component utilizing the encapsulated identification and routing information of the second component where the invocation does not contain identification and routing information.

15. An appliance configured to perform a physical operation on an article, having a control board with an arbitrary software component characterized by:

the arbitrary software component having functional capabilities and dependencies on software or hardware external to arbitrary software component, wherein the arbitrary software component has identifiers of its own functional capabilities and dependencies.

16. The appliance of claim 15 comprising at least one other arbitrary software component, wherein at least one of the dependencies is a functional capability of the other arbitrary software component.

17. The appliance of claim 16 wherein routing information to facilitate the collaboration based on the identifiers of functional capabilities and dependencies is obtained by one of discovery confirmation messages, propagated discovery confirmation messages, manual configuration, semi-manual configuration, hard coded configuration software, and a software compilation process.

18. The appliance of claim 17 wherein the arbitrary software components collaborate and the capabilities and dependencies of the arbitrary software components are discoverable by way of the identifiers.

19. The appliance of claim 17 further comprising an embedded virtual router comprising a routing table with the routing information whereby to facilitate messaging in the collaboration based on the routing table.

20. The appliance of claim 17 wherein the identifiers are class identifiers.

21. The appliance of claim 17 wherein the routing information contains one of object identifiers and other addressing identifiers.

22. The appliance of claim 17 wherein the routing information contains a proxy identifier that represents multiple identifiers.

23. The appliance of claim 17 wherein the routing information contains instance identifiers.

24. A method of creating routing information for an embedded virtual router to route messaging for a collaboration of at least two arbitrary software components in an appliance network comprising:

establishing identifiers of the capabilities and dependencies of the at least two arbitrary software components, and

populating a routing table with the identifiers.

25. The method of claim 24 wherein the populating step occurs by one of discovery confirmation messages, propagated discovery confirmation messages, manual configuration, semi-manual configuration, hard coded configuration software, and a software compilation process.

26. The method of claim 24 wherein the establishing step occurs by one of manual configuration, semi-manual configuration, hard coded configuration software, and a software compilation process.

27-1. The method of claim 27 wherein the aggregating step occurs by one of discovery confirmation messages, propagated discovery confirmation messages, manual configuration, semi-manual configuration, hard coded configuration software, and a software compilation process.

28. In an embedded virtual router for an appliance system having at least two arbitrary software components that collaborate with each other to enable an appliance to perform a physical cycle of operation on an article, each arbitrary software component having at least one namespace, the improvement comprising a routing table containing identifiers for routing messages to or from the arbitrary software components independently of the architecture of the appliance system whereby functional identifiers in a message maintain their meaning as messages are conveyed.

29. The embedded virtual router of claim 28 wherein the routing table is established from messages discovering the identifiers.

30. The embedded virtual router of claim 29 further comprising a software agent that propagates discovery messages across multiple networks.

31. The embedded virtual router of claim 30 wherein the software agent stores interposing identifiers to allowed memory constrained systems to optimize the storage of arbitrary object identifiers into small data structures of continuous values.

32. The embedded virtual router of claim 30 wherein the networks are the same.

33. The embedded virtual router of claim 30 wherein the networks are different.

34. The embedded virtual router of claim 28 wherein the appliance system comprises at least three control boards, each having at least one arbitrary software component, the control boards being chained together in two different networks wherein each control board has a routing table and each arbitrary software component has at least one identifier, and wherein each control board has a routing table containing identifiers whereby messages can be expediently propagated across the networks with no message requiring more than routing information to an adjacent control board.

35. The embedded virtual router of claim 34 wherein the embedded virtual router obtains references to the connected networks local to the control board comprising the embedded virtual router, whereby the embedded virtual router is independent of the network architectures of the control boards.

36. The embedded virtual router of claim 35 wherein the embedded virtual router obtains the references by one of discovery, configuration, compiler process or pre-process, or a table lookup.