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Building application stack (BAS)

Many commercial buildings have digital controls and extensive sensor networks that can be used to develop novel applications for saving energy, detecting faults, improving comfort, etc. However, buildings are custom designed, leading to differences in functionality, connectivity, controls and operation. As a result todays building applications are hard to write and non-portable. What is required is a form of mass customization that allows applications to automatically adapt to differences in buildings. We present BAS, an application programming interface and runtime for portable building applications. BAS provides a fuzzy query interface allowing application authors to describe the building components they require in terms of functional and spatial relationships. The resulting queries implicitly handle multiple building designs. BAS also incorporates a hierarchical driver model, exposing common functions of building components through standard interfaces. We demonstrate and evaluate BAS by implementing two novel applications -- an occupant HVAC control app and a ventilation optimization app -- on two different buildings using raw building control protocols and then again using BAS. We show that the BAS code is much shorter, easier to understand and does not change for each building.

System design for a synergistic, low power mote/BLE embedded platform

Modern IoT prototyping platforms fall short in terms of energy efficiency, connectivity and software programming practices. We present the design of a new hardware and software platform that addresses these shortcomings by bringing together Mobile, Wearable, Maker and Wireless Sensor Network technologies to enable rapid prototyping with a high degree of synergy and energy efficiency. This is achieved in part by leveraging the Memory Protection Unit on modern microcontrollers along with a novel syscall interface to provide kernel / user isolation and a clean concurrency model. Such a design allows a wide range of languages to be used for application development without significant adaptation. We demonstrate how careful choice of application language allows the naturally asynchronous nature of embedded programming to be expressed cleanly and powerfully. Finally we evaluate the platform in several integrated use cases, providing examples of the capabilities introduced by Synergy.

Zone-level occupancy counting with existing infrastructure

Through accurate and dynamic occupancy detection, building actuation systems can fine tune the targets of their actions to better fit the patterns of usage in modern buildings. We outline a method for achieving this through existing wireless infrastructure and present a demonstration of its viability in a corporate environment.

Enabling Synergy in IoT: Platform to Service and Beyond

To enable a prosperous Internet of Things, devices and services must be extensible and adapt to changes in the environment or user interaction patterns. These requirements manifest as a set of design principles for each of the layers in an IoT ecosystem, from hardware to cloud services. This paper gives concrete guidelines learned from building a full-stack Synergistic IoT platform.

Enabling synergy in IoT

To enable a prosperous Internet of Things, devices and services must be extensible and adapt to changes in the environment or user interaction patterns. These requirements manifest as a set of design principles for each of the layers in an IoT ecosystem, from hardware to cloud services. This paper gives concrete guidelines learned from building a full-stack Synergistic IoT platform.

BUSICO 3D: building simulation and control in unity 3D

In this demonstration, we present a novel system of building control and simulation focused on the integration of the physical and virtual worlds. Actuations and schedules can be manifested either in a physical space or in a virtualization of that space, allowing for more natural interactions with simulations and easier transferring of schedules and configurations from the simulated virtual environment to a real-world deployment. We provide an implementation using a widely used game engine (Unity 3D) and sMAP (Simple Measurement and Actuation Profile), a developed time series database and metadata store.

Design and analysis of a query processor for brick

Brick is a recently proposed metadata schema and ontology for describing building components and the relationships between them. It represents buildings as directed labeled graphs using the RDF data model. Using the SPARQL query language, building-agnostic applications query a Brick graph to discover the set of resources and relationships they require to operate. Latency-sensitive applications, such as user interfaces, demand response and model-predictive control, require fast queries --- conventionally less than 100ms. We benchmark a set of popular open-source and commercial SPARQL databases against three real Brick models using seven application queries and find that none of them meet this performance target. This lack of performance can be attributed to design decisions that optimize for queries over large graphs consisting of billions of triples, but give poor spatial locality and join performance on the small dense graphs typical of Brick. We present the design and evaluation of HodDB, a RDF/SPARQL database for Brick built over a node-based index structure. HodDB performs Brick queries 3-700x faster than leading SPARQL databases and consistently meets the 100ms threshold, enabling the portability of important latency-sensitive building applications.

HodDB: a query processor for brick

Brick [1] is a recent effort to design a metadata schema for describing building components, subsystems and the relationships between them. With growing interest in Brick, it is important to characterize how suitable Brick is for embedding in real building applications. This demonstration will present HodDB [3], a new database and query processor for Brick models. Attendees will use HodDB to query and explore real Brick models using a variety of textual and graphical query interfaces, and see how HodDB can embed Brick queries in real applications.

Portable Queries Using the Brick Schema for Building Applications: Demo Abstract

Sensorized commercial buildings are a rich target for building a new class of applications that improve operational and energy efficiency of building operations that take into account human activities. Such applications, however, rarely experience widespread adoption due to the lack of a common descriptive schema that would enable porting these applications and systems to different buildings. Our demo presents Brick [4], a uniform schema for representing metadata in buildings. Our schema defines a concrete ontology for sensors, subsystems and relationships among them, which enables portable applications. Using a web application, we will demonstrate real buildings that have been mapped to the Brick schema, and show application queries that extracts relevant metadata from these buildings. The attendees would be able to create example buildings and write their own queries.