Puryear, Nathan & Zaman, Mostafa & Eini, Roja & Abdelwahed, Sherif
Abstract and Figures
One of the leading frontiers of the Internet of Things (IoT) era, smart building systems have made modern homes more innovative, interconnected, and autonomous. The goal of a smart home system is to enhance users’ comfort, safety, and efficiency. In this paper, a smart building testbed is designed and constructed as a cyber-physical system that allows testing and validating building control algorithms, communication networks, and user interfaces. The building control unit is responsible for optimizing the performance of testbed actuators (thermal, lighting, and access systems), whereby building parameters are aggregated via a set of distributed sensors and communicated to a management system. This data is observed and analyzed by the control system to produce optimal control commands. The building communication network is developed based on the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol, in which subscribers receive the measurement data, format it, and send it to the user-interface unit. The user interface is implemented in a Node-RED platform, where the data is visualized in real-time, and users are capable of interacting with the automation system. Experimental results demonstrate the usefulness of such a prototype for smart building monitoring and control research.
