Service Oriented Development of Building Energy Management Systems - An Architecture Blueprint

Building automation and energy management systems increase the value of buildings by making them more comfortable, productive, and energy efficient. However, the hardware and software technologies underlying actual systems are largely monolithic and incompatible with each other hampering extensibility and favouring consumer lock-in. In order to overcome this problem we propose to create an middleware architecture, that abstract the heterogeneity of automation systems and provide sophisticated functionality to applications forthe heterogeneity of automation systems and provide sophisticated functionality to applications for intelligent control and energy management. Our middleware, will expose services that allows to abstract the numerous protocols and technical requirements associated with each manufacturer to applications, allowing developers to apply all their effort designing algorithms and innovative techniques that maximize the energy efficiency, without worrying about the technical details of each existing system. The concept will be applied in a real-world setting with the implementation of a service-oriented architecture prototype for energy management and intelligent control of Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) office rooms.