SensorAct

Buildings, with their different subsystems interacting with diverse occupants, constitute a complex Cyber-Physical-Human infrastructure. Monitoring and controlling this complex ecosystem is essential both for efficient and optimized operations of building subsystems and for influencing the occupant behavior. A critical enabling technology in this case is a middleware system for buildings that can provide support for deriving rich inferences by fusing and analyzing intentionally acquired or opportunistically available data from diverse embedded sensors, human feedback, and existing building subsystems. This paper presents Sensor Act, a Scriptable middleware system architecture for energy management applications in buildings. In addition to providing support for managing and integrating heterogeneous sensing and actuation systems in buildings, Sensor Act provides two emerging features: (1) a scripting framework for application developers to extend and automate the various energy management functions of the buildings, and (2) a rule-based sensor data and control sharing mechanism for fine-grained sharing for building owners. We describe the detailed system architecture and design, and provide proof of concept through multiple third party applications built using Sensor Act APIs and deployment in diverse settings across India and United States. Sensor Act is released in open source for community use.

We present the design, implementation and deployment experiences of SensorAct, an open source federated middleware for building management. We demonstrate two main features of our system that allows 1) Device owners to grant fine-grained privileges for sharing control and sensing infrastructure with other users and 2) Users to create and schedule simple building monitoring and control applications such as actuation and notification on occurrence of building events through an intuitive user interface.

The archaic centralized software systems, currently used to manage buildings, make it hard to incorporate advances in sensing technology and user-level applications, and present hurdles for experimental validation of open research in building information technology. Motivated by this, we — a transnational collaboration of researchers engaged in development and deployment of technologies for sustainable buildings — have developed SensorAct, an open-source federated middleware incorporating features targeting three specific requirements: (i) Accommodating a richer ecosystem of sensors, actuators, and higher level third-party applications (ii) Participatory engagement of stakeholders other than the facilities department, such as occupants, in setting policies for management of sensor data and control of electrical systems, without compromising on the overall privacy and safety, and (iii) Flexible interfacing and information exchange with systems external to a building, such as communication networks, transportation system, electrical grid, and other buildings, for better management, by exploiting the teleconnections that exist across them. SensorAct is designed to scale from small homes to network of buildings, making it suitable not only for production use but to also seed a global-scale network of building testbeds with appropriately constrained and policed access. This paper describes SensorAct’s architecture, current implementation, and preliminary performance results.