Structure and Design of Building Automation Systems
In New Information Technologies in Science, Education, Telecommunications and Business (IT+SE'98), Yalta-Gurzuff, Ukraine, März 1998,
Abstract
"Structure and Design of Building Automation Systems"
Bernd Schuermann
University of Kaiserslautern
Abstract
Building automation is the control and management of the whole building installation which
comprises heating, air conditioning, light, security equipment, etc. The overall goal is the
reduction of resource consumption, the increase of safety and security, as well as the increase
of the comfort of the people. To reach this goal we need a comprehensive, large distributed
control software that makes use of the whole equipment.
This talk consists of three parts: We first give a short overview of the application domain
"building automation" to give an impression of the requirements on the control software. We
then describe the environment in which the control software is embedded. In large buildings
this is a huge distributed environment consisting of hierarchical busses which connect plenty
of sensors, actuators, and small processors. Finally, we present our approach of Hardware/Soft-
ware-Codesign of building automation systems. The functionality of the building control sys-
tem has to be partitioned onto a large set of distributed processors which interact via a suitable
communication system. The design of the embedded control systems has further to ensure con-
straints like maximum reaction times, fault tolerance, and low costs.
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