Brume - A Horizontally Scalable and Fault Tolerant Building Operating System

Abstract

The physically centralized nature of current building automation systems increases complexity and has limited scalability and fault tolerance. A building automation system which can scale to encompass a future Internet of things, needs an architecture which is decentralized from the lowest to the highest layers. We present Brume, a building operating system which logically provides the same kind of service oriented architecture as a modern building operating system, while physically it runs on the same fabric as a future Internet of Things; large numbers of small and heterogeneous devices. This enables Brume to be highly horizontally scalable and fault tolerant through means of redundancy, while also being secure and simple to operate. To verify the expected benefits and the applicability of the platform for building automation, a prototype is developed for a real building setup. A set of micro benchmarks are run against the prototype to evaluate various aspects of the design, and two cases are used to show the platforms ability to support real-time control of building equipment and supervisory control based on neural network-based predictions.