Big Building Data - a Big Data Platform for Smart Buildings

Abstract

Future buildings will more and more rely on advanced Building Management Systems (BMS) connected to a variety of sensors, actuators and dedicated networks. Their objectives are to observe the state of rooms and apply automated rules to preserve or increase comfort while economizing energy. In this work, we advocate for the inclusion of a dedicated system for sensors data storage and processing, based on Big Data technologies. This choice enables new potentials in terms of data analytics and applications development, the most obvious one being the ability to scale up seamlessly from one smart building to several, in the direction of smart areas and smart cities. We report in this paper on our system architecture and on several challenges we met in its elaboration, attempting to meet requirements of scalability, data processing, flexibility, interoperability and privacy. We also describe current and future end-user services that our platform will support, including historical data retrieval, visualisation, processing and alarms. The platform, called BBData - Big Building Data, is currently in production at the Smart Living Lab of Fribourg and is offered to several research teams to ease their work, to foster the sharing of historical data and to avoid that each project develops its own data gathering and processing pipeline.