The physical entities which are taken into account by Machine to Machine (M2M) telecom applications are more and more heterogeneous. The challenge addressed by our research is the automatic integration and configuration of all these types of physical entities in M2M systems, with a homogeneous solution that generalizes self-configuration approaches used for networked digital devices. This thesis presents a general theoretical framework and basic mechanisms for the identification and configuration of such physical entity models in distributed embedded information systems. Our approach deals jointly with equipment and space entities encompassing the ”Internet of Things” (IoT) and ”interactive environment” viewpoints in a renewed interpretation of ambient intelligence. This work has been motivated initially by home energy management applications, trying to integrate into the Home Area Network all home entities that play a role in energy management, but do not have a networked interface of their own. This corresponds to a qualitative extension of the perimeter of the Home Area Network. This integration is achieved in a way similar to what is done for state of the art digital devices, through a spontaneous discovery and configuration mechanism, with the following stages: detection of the presence of a physical entity by analyzing the coincidence of significant events detected by sensors; selection of the first generic model corresponding to the detected physical entity from a reference ontology, on the basis of received sensors data; creation of a software component representing the detected physical entity, based on the selected model, associated with relevant sensors and actuators; provision of application interface for monitoring and control of the target entity through this intermediate software component; iterative update of the identified entity model on the basis of data from associated sensors. The proposed approach has been validated and implemented in home environments, but it is intended to be generalized and expanded to environments such as buildings or cities, offering a similarly shared infrastructure for all M2M applications in these environments
