CURRENT CHALLENGES IN ABSTRACTING DATA POINTS

Services in building automation traditionally have been implemented using a variety of fieldbus systems. Recently growing interest has been put into convergence of the various systems. A classical approach is the use of gateways. The engineering effort, however, to build gateways for an arbitrary number of systems is of quadratic order. This paper focuses on a data-centered view, which defines a set of abstract services needed for building services, and discusses the resulting challenges. With this approach an application can be migrated from one system to another, leading to a linear engineering effort for controllers, data servers and multi-protocol nodes.