Structure and Design of Building Automation Systems

Building automation comprises the control and management of the whole building installation which is heating, air conditioning, light, security equipment, etc. The overall goal is to reduce resource consumption, to increase safety and security, as well as to increase the comfort of the people. To reach this goal we need a comprehensive, large distributed control software that makes use of the whole equipment. This paper consists of three parts: We first give a short overview of the application domain “building automation” to give an impression of the requirements on the control software. We then describe the environment in which the control software is embedded. In large buildings this is a huge distributed environment consisting of hierarchical busses which connect plenty of sensors, actuators, and small processors. Finally, we present our approach of Hardware/Software-Codesign of building automation systems. The functionality of the building control system has to be partitioned onto a large set of distributed processors which interact via a suitable communication system. The design of the embedded control systems has further to ensure constraints like maximum reaction times, fault tolerance, and low costs.