Design of a Web-Based Building Management System Using Ajax and Web Services

As a new generation of Internet communication technologies, Web Services are becoming an increasingly popular middleware technology used to integrate heterogeneous building automation system (BAS) on the Internet. Ajax technology, with which web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page, has gained popularity recently. The article aims to present a web-based building management system (BMS) based on Ajax and Web Services for realizing real-time monitoring and control of BAS on the Internet. The BMS is applied to a BAS within a BACnet network. Some public Web Services methods, which can read and write BACnet data points from the BACnet network, are developed based on a BACnet protocol stack. These Web Services methods can be invoked by other applications to realize BAS integration and interoperation with enterprise applications on the Internet. By invoking the Web Services to get real-time data in the BACnet network, Ajax, which can provide a rich-client browser application, is adopted to design the web GUIs of the BMS.