Concept for a Service-oriented Architecture in Building Automation Systems

On the consumer side exists great potential to use energy more efficiently. To exploit this potential, an intelligent control of building automation is required. The building automation market offers a variety of technologies, which do not rely on uniform standards. The programming effort for the appropriate implementation of identical functions in different locations is enormous and can be significantly reduced through a virtualization approach. In this way, real devices are represented by virtual devices that interact with stakeholders through business processes. To describe the business processes, workflows are used which consist of individual reusable and combinable services. These services were grouped into three categories. In addition to the room-/building-control-category, services are divided into metering/analysis/reporting-category and monitoring/configuration/user interface-category. The flexible combination and coordination of services must be supported. This is done by the use of a service- oriented architecture (SOA).