I assume you need to do this system-wide for a testing scenario? In which case you might be well served by Apple’s UI Automation framework, a JavaScript-based tool useful for on-device testing.
While you can’t do things like simulate a home-button press, you can send your app to the background for a specified duration, for example:
UIATarget.localTarget().deactivateAppForDuration(seconds);
Here are the docs:
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/DeveloperTools/Reference/UIAutomationRef