Interoperable integration of building automation systems using RESTful BACnet Web services

Building automation domain is affected by a diversity of standards and technologies. With the upcoming Internet of Things heading for a pervasive network of interconnected smart things and the need for efficient and intelligent energy management systems, the necessity of integrating these heterogeneous building automation environments soars. Thus, standardized, interoperable, secure, and scalable solutions are required. Well-established Web service technologies based on the Internet Protocol act as key enabler to realize this vision. In this work, an approach for the seamless and interoperable integration of building automation systems based on RESTful BACnet/WS is presented. In order to ease the integration process, the BAC-net/WS specification is described as formal, machine-readable object model. Additionally, most common building blocks of building automation systems including logical as well as physical resources are specified in the form of type definitions to unify integration. Furthermore, a proof-of-concept implementation of a BACnet/WS server is realized in order to illustrate the functional capability of the presented approach.