BaaS – Building as a Service

The BaaS project targets the need for comprehensive and open cross-domain management and control services in today’s buildings. The problem is that these integrated management and control services are not yet available due to the separation of automation disciplines into independent control systems e.g. for lighting control, HVAC (heating, ventilation and air-conditioning), safety and security. The trend towards smart commercial buildings demands the integration of building automation systems with ICT systems and other building related information over the complete building lifecycle.

This requires a novel approach towards the modelling of a building with respect to its properties and functions. The modelling will also include the utilization of building facilities by different stakeholders like facility managers, tenants, occupants and visitors. The main goal of the BaaS project is to establish a generic service platform for commercial buildings that integrates traditional building automation and management systems with ICT infrastructures. This platform supports the development and deployment of novel valued added services and applications that take advantage of an integrated model of novel and legacy building systems and the data provided and consumed by them.

In more detail, BaaS targets four technical objectives aiming at conceptualizing and developing:

• A flexible open building service platform facilitating the generation and deployment of value-added building services at considerably lower cost compared to the state of the art;

• A BaaS data model providing additional meta-information to simplify the engineering of value added services and applications for the BaaS system and the integration of legacy systems;

• Model-based mechanisms for analysis, aggregation and transformation of data according to the meta-information provided in the BaaS data model;

• Methods for the integration of existing and novel sources of information to create a “building information sphere” considering all stakeholders of the building.

The main innovations of the project include flexible integration mechanisms for existing building systems, the abstraction of monitoring and control functions facilitating the aggregation and transformation of building-related information on different levels, mechanisms for combining different sources of information in a comprehensive building model, and goal-oriented control services.

These innovations lead to increased business value by enabling the creation of smart monitoring and control services, as well as a comprehensive building information ecosystem. Examples of these services are advanced benchmarking and profiling of resource utilization (e.g. energy consumption), goal-oriented reconfiguration of building systems (e.g. in case of sharing the facilities of buildings between multiple tenants) and comprehensive maintenance services that help reducing the TCO and increasing the satisfaction of building occupants. New interaction possibilities, such as “Facebook for buildings”, open new ways of information exchange between different stakeholders.

The envisioned BaaS service platform and its value-added services create additional opportunities in the building ecosystem and new roles in the business value chain for buildings. These opportunities will strengthen the competitiveness of the European Industry compared to competitors from the US and Asia.

BaaS is in agreement with the two application domains Infrastructure & Basic Services and Group of the ITEA2 roadmap (edition 3). In addition, BaaS closely matches the technology categories Content & Knowledge: Acquisition & Processing and Network & Computing: Services.

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