Web Enabled Wireless Sensor Networks for Facilities Management

Abstract

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> The cornerstone of building and overall facilities management is accurate and up-to-date monitoring of the context of the enterprise building environment and its surroundings, usually performed by sensors dispersed throughout the premises. Currently, the majority of building management systems is tightly coupled with the sensors that they utilize, restricting their extensibility. The emergence of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has brought significant benefits as far as monitoring is concerned, since they are more cost-efficient, due to the lack of wiring installations, compared to wired sensor solutions and allow for flexible positioning of the sensors, especially when building retrofitting is concerned. In line with the established move towards integration of enterprise level services, it is beneficial to consider the WSNs within that scope. In this paper, we propose to exploit a service oriented architecture for developing an enterprise networking environment that is used for integrating facilities management applications and building management systems with other operational enterprise functions for the purpose of information sharing and monitoring, controlling, and managing the enterprise environment. The WSN is viewed as an information service provider not only to building management systems but also to wider applications in the enterprise infrastructure. We provide specification and implementation details of the proposed architecture and discuss evaluation planning. </para>