The Building Operating System (BOS): IoT Devices and Systems Aggregator

The Building Operating System (BOS) is a platform to provide standardized Web API sets over heterogeneous vendor-specific APIs for controlling and monitoring building facilities. The jq-based parser for transforming JSON data and an API bridge mechanism provide a method for both direct and indirect access to underlying IoT devices or services, allowing existing building facility management systems to collaborate with the BOS. The BOS entrusts the third-party OpenID connect providers and the access manager of the target facility, for the API user authentication and access authorization. The BOS is implemented as microservices and deployed on a Kubernetes cluster. Through our case study of applying BOS to heterogeneous IoT devices from multiple vendors, we have confirmed that existing devices can be accessed via standardized Web API sets by direct API conversions and indirect access using the API bridge.