Open BMS – IoT driven Architecture for the Internet of Buildings Alan McGibney, Susan Rea Nimbus Centre for Embedded Systems Research Cork Institute of Technology Cork, Ireland {Susan.Rea, Alan.Mcgibney}@cit.ie Joern Ploennigs IBM Research - Ireland Smarter Cities Technology Center Dublin, Ireland Joern.Ploennigs@ie.ibm.com Abstract—This paper describes the creation of an IoT driven architecture to support the realization of an OpenBMS approach to managing blocks of buildings. The objective is to overcome the complexities of integration, operation and management of heterogeneous building systems by leveraging existing IoT approaches. The goal is to eliminate vertical data silos and enable the holistic management of energy across existing and new building blocks. Keywords—OpenBMS; architecture; IoT; internet of buildings; energy management. I. INTRODUCTION Buildings often contain legacy systems that are not well integrated with other systems [1]. This hinders the deployment of system that enable further energy savings such as analytic systems, predictive control, or demand response [2-4]. Opening the building interfaces to such tools is the first step. The second step is connecting these systems into a collaborative platform that allows the management of blocks of buildings across the globe. This is essential in particular for multinational companies that have global building portfolios and that are looking for integrated management solutions [5]. We define an open building management system (OpenBMS) approach for energy management as infrastructure that can be easily deployed across existing and new building blocks across the globe to open the use of building data for multiple systems and allow easy access and exchange of data. Such an infrastructure would inherently need to be complemented by a secure communications infrastructure backbone that scales from building to multiple buildings. This open cloud based infrastructure would need to offer different extension points for enhanced cooperation from easy programming tools for control logic to secure web services for backend systems. In line with this vision for an Open BMS approach, Internet of Things (IoT) technology brings with it the opportunity to roll out integrated building management systems on an international scale. Current practices for building automation and management that control heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), lighting, access control and security traditionally act as silos which are operated independently and are provided as proprietary systems by multiple vendors. This leads to vendor lock-in and isolated systems that are operated independently of the organization’s core IT networks which further limits the accessibility and integration potential of these systems. The need for cooperation, interaction, and coordinated operation of multiple systems is being recognized by system integrators, facilities managers and BMS manufacturers alike and is spurning a need to look towards technologies that can bridge the gaps between systems. An OpenBMS approach powered by IoT technology offers a systems of systems solution that makes integration of heterogeneous systems easier, reduces administration in terms of managing multiple standalone systems and will be readily deployable across existing and new building blocks. In addition it will offer the ability to accurately assess actual performance through continuous fined grained data extraction over standards compliant, secure data channels. IoT enablement means that objects (devices and systems) are accessible over the internet moving their reach beyond their local built environment. This can assist in the identification, classification and cataloguing of all objects across buildings and can be used to optimize the current operating conditions for specific targets, i.e. use IoT technology to provide greater insight into the energy performance across and within a block of buildings. IoT provides the capability to position intelligence where it is needed, where data processing and analytics can be positioned at the edge devices or in the cloud offering both scalability and flexibility. Self-managing and intelligent edge devices and systems can make local decision concerning when and who they share data with in relation to other devices, systems, the cloud and external third party services. In stark contrast is the traditional BMS which acts as a monolithic centralized infrastructure for individual buildings. Cloud side capability can lend itself to providing a single administrative user interface, real time performance monitoring and analytics incorporating energy data, occupancy data, air quality and other data (such as weather, energy storage, grid pricing, etc.) to facilitate informed decision making in order to reduce energy use and operating costs. II. RELATED WORK Several concepts for open BMS approaches exist. Dawson-Haggerty [1] defined a layered software architecture that has a hardware abstraction layer to integrate various systems, a time series layer and a software layer. Fierro extended this in [4] to an extensible architecture that includes