Integrated Connectivity for Smart Buildings – an IoT Topic

Conference: VDE-Kongress 2016 - Internet der Dinge
11/07/2016 - 11/08/2016 at Mannheim, Deutschland

Proceedings: VDE-Kongress 2016

Pages: 6Language: englishTyp: PDF

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Authors:
Alexeeva, Zoya; Gamer, Thomas; John, Dirk; Kantz, Florian; Schmitt, Johannes (ABB AG Corporate Research, Ladenburg, Germany)

Abstract:
The Internet of Things (IoT) is about interconnected and communicating things that generate, collect, and exchange information (semi-)independent of humans. It brings a lot of challenges as well as potential and, therefore, generates more and more research activities. These challenges are not new – they are well known from the building automation (BA) domain, where they emerged with Smart Buildings – buildings that can generate and automatically process information for user benefits, such as energy optimization or user comfort. In this article, we focus on the key challenge of both IoT and Smart Buildings: integrated connectivity. We highlight the benefits from user perspective, and provide a brief overview and a classification of the existing standards and solutions. We conclude that it is critical to define a common functional abstraction layer for IoT crossing the boundaries of standards, technologies, vendors, and application domains. Still, this does not necessarily require creating something entirely new; it might also be possible to reuse as much of the existing but limited solutions and add a new additional integration layer.