A Cyber-Physical Middleware Platform for Buildings in Smart Cities

In the realm of smart cities, tools for intelligent, real-time building energy management at the urban-scale are still evolving. Today, most commercial buildings have a dedicated Building Management System (BMS) to manage operations on-site efficiently; but there is no unified approach involving multiple stakeholders to manage them cooperatively in a district or urban scale. Thus, we formulate the following research question: ‘What is a feasible structure and what are the relevant components of a middleware that is easy to integrate within existing BMS/EMS and scalable for application in smart cities?’ To address this knowledge gap, this article proposes a new integrated and non-intrusive approach to cyber-physical middleware design using open-source tools. The implementation of proposed middleware in a case study building-scale project in Singapore is presented. Several features are analyzed to understand the relevance and scalability of proposed middleware as a technology enabler for smart building management in cities. The experiences and lessons learned from this project can be extrapolated to the urban-scale as more buildings are equipped with such systems. For this purpose, middleware code is also made available as open-source.