research-article

BuildingRules: A Trigger-Action--Based System to Manage Complex Commercial Buildings

Authors:

Alessandro A. Nacci,

Bharathan Balaji,

Paola Spoletini,

Donatella Sciuto,

Yuvraj AgarwalAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems, Volume 2, Issue 2

Article No.: 13, Pages 1 - 22

https://doi.org/10.1145/3185500

Published: 23 May 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Modern Building Management Systems (BMSs) have been designed to automate the behavior of complex buildings, but unfortunately they do not allow occupants to customize it according to their preferences, and only the facility manager is in charge of setting the building policies. To overcome this limitation, we present BuildingRules, a trigger-action programming-based system that aims to provide occupants of commercial buildings with the possibility of specifying the characteristics of their office environment through an intuitive interface. Trigger-action programming is intuitive to use and has been shown to be effective in meeting user requirements in home environments. To extend this intuitive interface to commercial buildings, an essential step is to manage the system scalability as large number of users will express their policies. BuildingRules has been designed to scale well for large commercial buildings as it automatically detects conflicts that occur among user specified policies and it supports intelligent grouping of rules to simplify the policies across large numbers of rooms. We ensure the conflict resolution is fast for a fluid user experience by using the Z3 SMT solver. BuildingRules backend is based on RESTful web services so it can connect to various BMSs and scale well with large number of buildings. We have tested our system with 23 users across 17 days in a virtual office building, and the results we have collected prove the effectiveness and the scalability of BuildingRules.

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BuildingRules: A Trigger-Action--Based System to Manage Complex Commercial Buildings

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems

ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems Volume 2, Issue 2

Special Issue on the Internet of Things: Part 1

April 2018

180 pages

ISSN:2378-962X

EISSN:2378-9638

DOI:10.1145/3229080

Editor:
Tei-Wei Kuo
National Taiwan University, and Academia Sinica, Taiwan

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Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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ACM Journals for the Design of Smart and Connected Systems

Publication History

Published: 23 May 2018

Accepted: 01 January 2018

Revised: 01 July 2017

Received: 01 July 2016

Published in TCPS Volume 2, Issue 2

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