CSA Preface Standards development within the Information Technology sector is harmonized with international standards development. Through the CSA Technical Committee on Information Technology (TCIT), Canadians serve as the Canadian Advisory Committee (CAC) on ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology (ISO/IEC JTC1) for the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the ISO member body for Canada and sponsor of the Canadian National Committee of the IEC. Also, as a member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Canada participates in the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (ITU-T). At the time of publication, ISO/IEC 18012-1:2004 is available from ISO and IEC in English only. CSA will publish the French version when it becomes available from ISO and IEC. This Standard has been formally approved, without modification, by the Technical Committee and has been approved as a National Standard of Canada by the Standards Council of Canada. Scope This part of ISO/IEC 18012 specifies requirements for product interoperability in the area of home and building automation systems. It specifies layers six and seven of the OSI reference model (see ISO/IEC 7498-1) with sufficient detail needed to design interoperable home electronic system products, while layers one to five are only specified to the point needed to check whether devices will be able to interoperate with one another. ISO/IEC 18012-1 is applicable to - stand-alone local/home networks, connected devices and applications - mixed local/home networks, connected devices and applications - automatically configured devices - installer configured devices - installer configured groups/clusters of devices. ISO/IEC 18012-1 specifies interoperability for system set-up, operation and management applied to devices connected to a single home control system or to different home control systems. Although a single uniform home control system would simplify operations, this standard recognises that multiple different networks may co-exist in the same house. This standard specifies requirements to assure that devices from multiple manufacturers work together to provide a specific application. Also, a specific device could be used for multiple applications. ISO/IEC 18012-1 specifies interoperability requirements with respect to - safety - addressing - applications - transport of information - set-up of devices/elements within home networks . static and/or dynamic binding between objects - management. This document does not specify how two home control systems share a common resource or how to ensure that two home control systems used within the same premises do not interfere with each other. However, this document requires that two home control systems may share a common resource, and that they do not interfere with one another.