AN EVENT-DRIVEN SOA-BASED PLATFORM FOR ENERGY- EFFICIENCY APPLICATIONS IN BUILDINGS

The topic of optimization of building operation is attracting significant interest in the community: monitoring of relevant Key Performance Indicators can help enhance state awareness and understanding; fault detection and identification can help identify irregular and ineffective operational modes; and, advanced control design techniques can yield effective/optimized operation with regards to energy performance and thermal comfort. Despite significant effort on development of algorithmic and methodological approaches to address these problems, the inherent complexity associated with practical demonstrations, has precluded testing and implementation of such approaches in realistic contexts. Within this paper, an event-driven Service-Oriented Architecture platform, is developed to address this gap and help facilitate the provision of advanced energyefficiency and energy-management services in buildings. The use of the Industry Foundation Classes provides a standardized data-model for describing the building and its components, while the use of Model View definitions is employed to define the exchange requirements for proper software component interoperability. Data collection and homogenization from the building is addressed through an abstraction layer, capable of hiding many of the intricacies and providing a clean interface for the development of building services. An exemplary application of the proposed architecture in a real office building in Greece is presented.