Demo: Web of Things in Building Automation

Automation of equipment in a building is essential to achieve reliable and energy-efficient operation. The devices used in Building Automation (BA) systems have different functional and non-functional requirements, and this leads to a heterogeneous system with vertical silos where multiple standards are at play along with vendor-specific information models and implementations. In such a situation establishing technical and semantic interoperability is challenging. Also, the absence of a method to uniformly represent entities across verticals and functional layers in BA, makes it difficult to link them to knowledge graphs that describe the building and its physical processes. The W3C Web of Things (WoT) aims to address this (and related) issues in cyber-physical systems (CPS). Based on our experience with a real-life implementation in the industry, we demonstrate how the challenge of creating uniform interface descriptions for the vast and heterogeneous BA standards landscape can be be overcome using WoT Thing Descriptions (TDs), and further, we show how such TDs can be linked to knowledge graphs by facilitating their integration in the engineering workflow. As a concrete use case, our demo shows how an automated fault detection system which we developed for room automation controls uses the TDs to reason about the physical process and its control programs and then retrieves process data for its analysis.