Abstract
The design of smart homes, buildings and environments currently suffers from a low maturity of available methodologies and tools. Technologies, devices and protocols strongly bias the design process towards vertical integration, and more flexible solutions based on separation of design concerns are seldom applied. As a result, the current landscape of smart environments is mostly populated by defectively designed solutions where application requirements (e.g., end-user functionality) are too often mixed and intertwined with technical requirements (e.g., managing the network of devices). A mature and effective design process must, instead, rely on a clear separation between the application layer and the underlying enabling technologies, to enable effective design reuse. The role of smart gateways is to enable this separation of concerns and to provide an abstracted view of available automation technology to higher software layers. This paper presents a blueprint for the information technology (IT) architecture of smart buildings that builds on top of established software engineering practices, such as model-driven development and semantic representation, and that avoids many pitfalls inherent in legacy approaches. The paper will also present a representative use case where the approach has been applied and the corresponding modeling and software tools.
Highlights
The construction of smart buildings and, more generally, the adoption of advanced monitoring, control and automation technologies in building management are increasingly important, as these allow one to meet ever-increasing energy efficiency goals, to match sophisticated personalization in user comfort, to enhance security and, more generally, to achieve higher levels of efficiency.The adoption of building automation systems (BAS), building management systems (BMS) or energy management systems (EMS), able to integrate and manage several kinds of automation technologies, is a mandatory task, and the “intelligent” subsystems in a building are constantly increasing in number and complexity
We propose the adoption of semantic representation techniques, by using the standards developed in the Semantic Web initiative [13], in particular ontologies expressed using the Ontology Web Language (OWL) [14]
The approach based on explicit modeling and horizontal layering for smart building systems stems from the application of modern software engineering techniques, such as those developed for other enterprise information systems, where system complexity and the desire for flexibility and maintainability require a strong investment in the correct architectural choices [17,18]
Summary
The construction of smart buildings and, more generally, the adoption of advanced monitoring, control and automation technologies in building management are increasingly important, as these allow one to meet ever-increasing energy efficiency goals, to match sophisticated personalization in user comfort, to enhance security and, more generally, to achieve higher levels of efficiency. Buildings host several intelligent plants, which fulfill different design goals (e.g., energy distribution, air treatment and conditioning, surveillance, etc.), but do not share information nor common strategies This is partly due to the sheer variety of available technologies, which have evolved independently and in competition with each other, and to the management and subcontracting processes, which naturally tend to partition the work into smaller independent units. We will illustrate modern IT architectures that will allow a deeper integration of existing systems, overcoming the traditionally hard interoperability issues and enabling new use-cases to be more deployed in different kinds of buildings These modern architectures are mostly based on independent middleware solutions and on explicit modeling of building and plant features: different researchers propose different technical solutions, the general approach is shared.
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