Decentralized Management Framework for heterogeneous Devices in FM

Abstract

The rapid technological development of smart building appliances leads to changing system interfaces with each iteration of the product development cycle. Combined with the huge amount of device manufacturers and different submarkets for smart devices this leads to difficulties for the integration of different systems into an interconnected Building Automation System (BAS) and further into Building Management Systems (BMS). Existing solutions for device interoperability are lacking in certain aspects. The Web of Things (WoT) protocol is the most promising approach for communication. Based on the relevant literature, this paper presents a framework architecture that augments the WoT protocol with decentralized authentication and authorization capabilities based on biscuit tokens. Furthermore, baseline protocol workflows enable the integration with existing management systems while creating an immutable configuration and workflow history of the building infrastructure. We further discuss how this framework enables new use cases and argue for its potential to decrease operational cost and thus increase building value.