Integrating Building Automation Technologies with Smart Cities

An Assessment Study of past, Current and Future Interroperable Technologies

Georgios Lilis, Gilbert Conus, Nastaran Asadi and Maher Kayal

Electronics Laboratory,

Ecole Polytechnique F

erale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

Keywords:

Smart Cities, Cloud Computing, Smart Environments, Smart Buildings, Smart Grid, Internet of Things, Web

of Things, IPv6.

Abstract:

Future smart cities would integrate a wide range of mostly heterogeneous systems and ICT is an essential asset

in the coordination of those. The smart buildings, a major smart cities research and development domain,

should advance beyond the complex automation tools and the anticipated energy and comfort envelope. The

universal convergence to technologies that would enable the seamless integration with the anticipated smart

cities urban environment should be highlighted. Although it is a concept widely accepted for current and

future developing standards, it is much less communicated across scientiﬁc ﬁelds as for example the urban

development and building automation. Even worse its necessity, in the latter, is frequently challenged. This

paper ﬁrstly will try to address the market and scientiﬁc criticism towards a fully web-services enabled building

in a fair and transparent approach. Secondly it proposes a system as an interoperability layer able to build

advanced managements schemes by integrating the assets of current automation and monitoring systems to

the Internet backbone.

1 INTRODUCTION

The population growth creates immerse problems in

terms of energy management and sustainability poli-

cies, rising infrastructure cost, transportation con-

gestion, micro climate changes, natural hazards and

emergency situations handling (Kelly, 2010). Besides

the technical and physical challenges, there are soci-

ological, organizational and political as well (Dawes

et al., 2009). These issues triggered a global move

towards an holistic approach to ensure livable condi-

tions and continued development in the governance

sphere of the current and the future cities. In this

context the smart city concept was introduced as an

innovative ecosystem having the potential to address

the increasing problems of urban environment. It will

empower the participation of city’s administration,

citizens, businesses and other stakeholders in the ef-

fort to transform the cities under a common strategy.

One of the main targets for the smart cities trans-

formation is the building sector in the frame of sus-

tainability and energy efﬁciency. Nowadays the build-

ing has evolved from the essential structure providing

the human shelter to a very complex construction in-

This research has been funded by Nano-Tera.ch, a program

of the Swiss Confederation, evaluated by SNSF.

corporating many scientiﬁc ﬁelds. However it has not

advanced as much in terms of thermal and electrical

energy efﬁciency. On the contrary, the primary energy

consumption of the building sector by 2009 in United

States, has increased by 48% compared to 1980 (En-

ergy Efﬁciency & Renewable Energy, 2007). Con-

sidering that, building innovations become the prime

objective towards the inﬂuential sustainable urban fu-

ture. It is apparent that to harness this potential the

building sector of smart cities should undergo fun-

damental transformation in terms of integrated tech-

nologies.

In the context of this potential, big market share

holders, mainly in the building automation and en-

ergy, were quick to ﬁll the gap and grasp the opportu-

nity for enforcing their own standards. Together with

the sometimes vague deﬁnitions of the smart build-

ing management, it permitted also the modest market

holders and start ups to offer their own innovating so-

lutions. This trend was more than welcome and in

fact was stimulated by the authorities since it offered

business opportunities for powerful innovation to be

introduced. In spite of that, as more and more parties

entered with their own protocols, it started to become

a babel tower where hardly any integration between

manufacturers’ solutions was possible.

The ones commonly found in computer and em-

370

Lilis G., Conus G., Asadi N. and Kayal M..

Integrating Building Automation Technologies with Smart Cities - An Assessment Study of past, Current and Future Interroperable Technologies.

DOI: 10.5220/0005478803700375

In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Smart Cities and Green ICT Systems (SMARTGREENS-2015), pages 370-375

ISBN: 978-989-758-105-2

 2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

Table 1: Major open Building Automation Standards.

Standard Name Domain of functionality

BACnet Management & Automation

LonWorks Automation & Field

KNX Automation & Field

ModBus Automation

M-Bus Field

DALI Field

bedded networks are good candidates for meeting

both public and private needs. They provide the re-

quired interoperability that would catalyze the trans-

formation of the smart buildings. Additionally,

the ICT, bulletproofed in the competitive IT mar-

ket, offered the required security and authentication

schemes. Despite the above and the strong academic

support, not every stakeholder of the smart building

industry is convinced for the need of ICT based on

web services.

The Internet enabled devices are now more than

ever in the spotlight of both the IT as well as the smart

grid research groups. However their purpose and us-

ability is frequently challenged by the current mature

building automation standards. Literature search did

not yield any satisfactory and independent research

on the advantages and drawbacks of each technology

camp. Instead, there is an abundance of advocates and

literature for each one individually.

We strongly believe that for the future smart cities

all possibilities should be taken into consideration

before crossing one out. Therefore this paper at-

tempts ﬁrstly to examine the advantages claimed by

the legacy building automation standards and high-

light or refute accordingly. Subsequently it brings out

the unique features offered by web technologies for

a feasible rapid progressing towards smart cities and

suggests a platform to gradually integrate them with

the automation systems currently used.

2 COUNTERARGUMENTS

This section illustrates the major claims made by

the current building automation specialists and ma-

jor market share holders who meet the fully web en-

abled building with skepticism. Table 1 highlights

the current major standards prevailing in building au-

tomation and management with their major domain of

functionality (Kastner et al., 2005).

2.1 IoT as a Market Trend

The skeptics were quick to consider the IoT yet an-

other Internet bubble like the Dot Com that should

not base the building and energy management upon.

They state that not enough comprehensive research

has been conducted on the proﬁtability of the intel-

ligent buildings using the IoT. On the contrary, the re-

search work and industrial reviews which have been

conducted on the longterm investment evaluation and

life cycle analysis, are for the traditional building au-

tomation system (BAS) standards (Wong et al., 2005).

This inhibits at the moment the interest of industrial

and other large scale projects where the cost beneﬁts

are not easily estimated, thus limiting the potential to

residential applications or laboratory test-benches.

It is true that the IoT are over marketed nowadays.

In fact many products are named IoT when in fact are

just Internet connected devices without any of the fun-

damentals an IoT ecosystem should have. The major

concern is the lack of clear added value for the con-

sumer in question and in fact they are usually consid-

ered as a lifestyle gadget. However this does not mean

that is all of a bubble. On the contrary, the global in-

terest lead many advocates to believe that it could take

years, but it will eventually introduce the innovating

concepts that would revolutionize our regards of the

buildings and their energy use. Besides, as IoT for in-

telligent buildings gets reﬁned in the context of smart

grid’s standardization, the investment assessment by

research groups and ﬁrms will be quick to arrive.

Legacy building automation specialists claim in

addition, that there is not a clear approach and model-

ing for utilizing this enormous data brought by the ex-

tensive connectivity of large number of devices. Thus

concluding that IoT is becoming more of a burden that

an opportunity.

This cannot be further from the truth. The re-

search in computer science is towards the creation

of extensive models for semantically representation

of the data originating from the excessive number of

end devices, proﬁling the building occupants (Dong

and Andrews, 2009) and even predicting the future

behavior. In market terms, this paves the way for

new business models based entirely on the building’s

sensors data analytics. An ambitious proposal could

be for example the behavioral analysis of the occu-

pant or retroﬁtting recommendations in order to limit

the energy loses. Another possible scenario could

be the comparison between different departments of

an industry and identiﬁcation of their energy wasting

points together with the recommended, appropriate

action. Both of the above are read-only (data-mining)

without any automation. Taking into account the pos-

sibility of distributed small actuators the potential sce-

narios increase further in scale and magnitude.

In the end the ”IoT potential” will be demon-

strated by the risk-taking companies that are willing

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InterroperableTechnologies

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to develop innovative new products and services for

the public.

2.2 Interoperability Challenges

One can not expect a single manufacturer to provide

continued product development indeﬁnitely, so the

only possible way to assure the market is the exis-

tence of compatible products from multiple manufac-

turers. The current building automation players claim

that the inconsistency issues of the past has been re-

solved; guaranteeing the current designs sustainabil-

ity. BACnet association for example claims more than

800 unique vendors use the standard with an increas-

ing trend and most importantly the vendors are not

locally isolated but global as well. The same be-

lief is observable on the LonWorks standard group,

claiming a 4000 product range and their devotion to

the open standards. This abundance of vendors com-

peting for the market share(supporting the same stan-

dard) has additionally the capacity to drive the prices

down.

In fact, literature even demonstrates designs for

multi-protocol devices (Granzer et al., 2008), elim-

inating the need of specialized gateways for inter-

protocol communication; thus increasing the poten-

tial product range available for each one. Research

groups simultaneously built on that for delivering

not only IP enabled building automation but also a

glimpse of the web services; signiﬁcantly questioning

the IoT and WoT investment necessity in an intelli-

gent building (Wang et al., 2004).

However the interoperability in current standards

comes at an evident cost. The fact that the major au-

tomation standards are open, does not imply they are

for free. For example Echelon

, who governs Lon-

Works standard, charges a fee for every device us-

ing their Neuron Chip. The BACnet international on

the contrary does not charge a fee, unless of course

you require a certiﬁcation of compatibility. Same

case with the KNX standard where no per device fee

is required, however the only available conﬁguration

tool(ETS4) requires a license. All these initial fees for

the smaller vendors can seem a costly exercise. Un-

fortunately this becomes even more prominent when

vendors produce a base product built with proprietary

protocols and change extra for the inclusion of a stan-

dard interface. According to (McMillan, 2010) this is

due to the fact that many vendor use add-on transla-

tion interfaces instead of directly build-in ones.

All in all it is apparent that integration of differ-

ent, and even of the same standard devices by various

vendors are not always straight forward. There is high

discrepancy between the interoperability that are sup-

posed to bring and the actual one.

2.3 Building Automation Performance

Legacy automation systems advocates strongly em-

phasize the veriﬁed and targeted performance of their

own ecosystems. Furthermore, they do have plenty

of enterprise costumers which prefer the certiﬁed de-

vices and value the deliberately slow process with

which these standards evolve and get reﬁned. Quite

often as well is valued more in the B2B relations the

after sales service in which legacy building automa-

tion vendors generally excel, compared to the equiva-

lent newcomers of web enabled products.

As these systems are more mature, it is expected

to have been installed and evaluated in multiple

premises. Throughout the years as well many re-

search groups used them to measure the performance

of the automation and the energy management (Kim

et al., 2000; Park and Hong, 2009). In addition, re-

search groups develop expansions based exclusively

on those standards. For example a prediction model

based solely on BACnet generated data (Pang et al.,

2012) or a BACnet based data acquisition framework

(Li and Neill, 2011). Those scientiﬁc outcomes in-

crease the impact factor and credibility of those stan-

dards to the corporate world.

Although the analysis of IoT as building automa-

tion tool falls short at the moment, this should not

be deterministic for the future of the technology. As

more work is conducted on their communication per-

formance and capabilities, the more they will ﬁnd

their way into the demanding market of building man-

agement.

3 WEB ENABLED BUILDING

MANAGEMENT

Ultimately the way to bridge efﬁciently the multiple

stakeholders and entities in a smart city without many

intermediate proxies is by utilizing the Internet back-

bone and the developments in the embedded electron-

ics. Without doubt the open systems and standards

found their way in the building management but the

future of the market goes beyond that. As the industry

matures, the target will be not only the IoT but sooner

or latter the embedded web services for the building

management, sometimes referred as Web of Things

(WoT). Building automation specialized standards are

best for applications spatially constrained in building.

IoT facilitate the communication between the devices

and across different buildings. Internet protocol how-

ever does not imply the same language of meaningful

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Figure 1: Implemented integration platform.

data exchange and it is where web services and WoT

on that regard, are relevant.

The great difference between WoT and IoT is not

only the existence of hundreds of micro devices with

Internet connectivity, but also the semantics that ex-

tend the former (Guinard et al., 2011). In simple

terms this means that no more BACnet thermostat,

KNX thermostat or even IoT thermostat, there is only

room temperature.

3.1 Numerous New Possibilities

A web enabled building can leverage the beneﬁts of

the abundance of end devices. Bottom up problem ap-

proach can achieve unprecedented energy efﬁciency

thanks to high granularity in monitoring (Dawood

et al., 2012) and control of individual loads. The

holistic, aggregated, large scale energy management

can also be an added asset.

Furthermore the ecosystem of devices and their

web enabled interface libraries will enable creative

application to materialize. Literature already includes

scenarios where human capital get engaged in a con-

tinuous sharing, increased awareness over their en-

ergy use and carbon footprint (Manzoor et al., 2013;

Diamantaki et al., 2013; Charitos et al., 2014). The

web technologies are the catalyst for these where hu-

mans, their personal devices and their activities get

integrated in this ecosystem with the ultimate target a

greener future with higher living standards.

Web of Things builds upon the advantages of

IoT and IT in general and they are not expected to

face protocol incompatibility issues. Additionally

the web and communication technologies used, have

been ﬁeld tested for many years in the IT market in

terms of security, reliability and scalability. Late stud-

ies scrutinizes the IT technologies for use in the con-

text of IoT, as for example in the domain of security.

(Riahi et al., 2014; Veijalainen et al., 2012)

Apart from new civil and social opportunities and

ease of adaptation, the plethora of generated data will

create new business models. Those would specialize

in data analytics (Leminen et al., 2012) which in turn

will drive the WoT and building management market

further. This development will not only revitalize the

slowing augmenting building automation business, it

will likewise encourage and fortify the opportunity

for new enterprises to enter this competitive market.

Ultimately the demand may create a separate mar-

ket with its own properties. A not so far fetched ex-

pectation can be a marketplace with applications for

portable devices focusing on living quarters. Already

major IT companies offer initial frameworks for smart

homes. Furthermore, nobody can deny the boom to

the wearable and health related applications the IoT

already brought (Futuresource Consulting, 2014).

In the end, this competition and industrial devel-

opment will return as socio-economic beneﬁts to the

society of the smart cities.

4 IMPLEMENTED WoT - IoT

INTERGRATION PLATFORM

The future building management designers should

shift from bringing new connectivity protocols, to en-

riching the palette of the semantic web services. Until

that point, intermediate technologies should be con-

sidered in order to facilitate the transition, with im-

merse priority the reusability in a fully web enabled

building. It would be therefore a merit if a system

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could combine both the legacy and the modern stan-

dard and slowly phase out the former in favor of the

latter. The proposed and implemented integration ar-

chitecture in Figure 1 is decomposed in 4 hierarchi-

cally distinct elements. Above the schematic, are vis-

ible the major challenges this work has faced.

The ﬁrst pillar is the Endpoint Nodes consisting

of actuators, sensors and other control devices of vari-

ous manufacturers and protocols. Purpose of these are

to provide the low latency interface to human activi-

ties and their impact on consumption, as well as the

means of actuation inside the control and optimization

loops. Besides the endpoints originating from the in-

dustry as for example are the Z-Wave nodes, this pil-

lar also includes endpoints entirely developed in the

electronics laboratory for the purpose of the build-

ing management. First technology is the distributed

controlling modules which communicate through the

power lines, without any additional wiring infrastruc-

ture. They are able to measure the individual power

consumption as well as to offer means of actuation

over the devices with the dimming and relay switch-

ing. The second custom made endpoint is an IP en-

abled solar energy harvesting multifunction environ-

mental sensor.

The second pillar handles the data collection, in-

terconnection and wrapping of the endpoints. It is

consisted of a highly efﬁcient ARM

microprocessor

unit, local ﬂash storage, as well as the required hard-

ware interfaces in one embedded electronics board

developed in the laboratory. Low complexity consol-

idation and data mining algorithms are running in or-

der to facilitate efﬁciently the available capacity in the

form of a Round Robin Database (Oetiker, 2014). The

key to address real time metering and control lies to

these Network Embedded Electronics. The added

beneﬁt of this pillar is the transparent mapping of the

multi-protocol 1

pillar’s addressing space to IPv6

addresses. At this point, the combination of the two

lower levels is visible to the upper ones as Internet

enabled devices or as commonly refereed, IoT.

The core of the system is the Centralized

Management Server. It implements an open source,

dynamic, RESTful web server. Purpose of it is to

interconnect the building with the smart cities and

smart grid stakeholders. It communicates with the

embedded electronics in high speed LAN using se-

cured TCP/IP links thanks to 2

pillar. It provides a

custom application programming interface (API) for

direct metering and actuation as well as all the tools

for implementing the optimization models. It is ap-

parent therefore that the IoT of the previous level

are now becoming WoT with easily accessible func-

tions and data analytics engine. The amount of gener-

ated data augments exponentially at this pillar due the

pyramidal structure of the architecture. It is therefore

a considerable challenge the storing and retrieving of

them in the reasonable time required by the applica-

tions.

At the last pillar, as a proof of concept, various

high level applications have been designed. The range

includes custom user CO

proﬁles based on user lo-

calization and loads ownership, load type recognition,

MATLAB

thermal and lighting models designed for

the building behavior prediction. All of them are fea-

sible due to the introduction of universal web services

that each application can leverage. The focus there-

fore is swifted to the creative idea from the burden

of communications and synchronization of numerous

endpoints

The implementation and the benchmarking of the

proposed platform is accomplished in a university

building of

Ecole Polytechnique F

erale de Lau-

sanne and is used as a case study for the evaluation of

hardware/software interconnection and performance

analysis. Currently the aforementioned system is be-

ing assessed in terms of latency and bandwidth con-

straints, self energy use and long term reliability. Af-

ter completion of those, the presented system would

be a feasible intermediate solution that will not de-

ter enterprises and consumers from investing in WoT

technologies if they already are in possession of cur-

rent building automation systems, ultimately keeping

the best of each sector.

5 CONCLUSIONS

No future smart cities can be imagined without in-

telligent buildings. Legacy building automation sys-

tems served the purpose very reliably in the previ-

ous decades. It is now the time to pass the baton to

the web enabled devices which have the potential to

bring the deal breaking innovation that would essen-

tially catalyze the smart cities entrance to urban life.

During the transition time, hybrid integrating plat-

forms like the proposed, could be used to coordinate

the fundamentally different systems until the univer-

sal acceptance of Internet connected devices in all

the hierarchical levels of the smart cities governance.

With this adaptation layer, the building stakeholders

get decoupled from the underlying platform and its re-

ﬁning steps towards the WoT with returns in reduced

investment cost and faster evolution.

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