IAL: Information Abstraction Layer to Include Multimedia in Building Automation Systems

Modern building automation systems enable the comprehensive observation and control of intelligent environments. The Internet of Things has reshaped building automation from closed and physically intertwined to more open and accessible systems. The accompanying emergence of multimedia in buildings such as audio and video through stream-based sensors opens up possibilities for profound and feature-rich applications. However, at present, building automation does not benefit from the inherent information contained in streamed multimedia. The goal of this work is to exploit informational value contained in multimedia in order to integrate stream-based sensors into existing building automation systems. This is accomplished with the introduction of an intermediate layer where complex information, such as multimedia, from different origins is untangled into pieces of information. Then, each piece of information is represented with an unambiguous description and can be consumed by microservices. Finally, a fog-based platform, which orchestrates multiple microservices, is used to provide services for users and automation tasks. To proof the usability of our proposed concept, an evaluation is conducted in a residential environment considering multiple use case scenarios involving streamed video and point cloud data. Solid results show that the system fulfills prior defined security, latency, privacy, extensibility, and scalability requirements.