Engineering and operation made easy - a semantics and service oriented approach to building automation

Building automation systems control many aspects of today's buildings - lightning control, air condition, shading, access control, and surveillance, just to name a few. This diversity and the diversity of related technologies and protocols entails that the extension or integration of building automation systems requires a major effort. To address these challenges, the ITEA3 Building as a Service (BaaS) project developed a reference architecture that is based on a service oriented approach enhanced with semantic descriptions that aims at model based code generation and simple integration of legacy devices. In this paper, we present an overview of the BaaS reference architecture with a specific focus on the information model and on the envisioned way to take advantage of the semantic descriptions for information filtering, search and discovery throughout the lifecycle of a building automation system.