Will web technologies impact on building automation systems architecture?

Offices, factories and even private housings are more and more endowed with building management systems (BMS) targeting an increase of comfort as well as lowering energy costs. This expansion is made possible by the progress realized in pervasive computing, providing small sized and affordable sensing devices. However, current BMS are often based on proprietary technologies, making their interoperability and evolution more difficult. For example, we observe the emergence of new applications based on intelligent data analysis able to compute more complex models about the use of the building. Such applications rely on heterogeneous sets of sensors, web data, user feedback and self-learning algorithms. In this position paper, we discuss the role of Web technologies for standardizing the application layer, and thus providing a framework for developing advanced building applications. We present our vision of TASSo, a layered Web model facing actual and future challenges for building management systems. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V.