SensorAct: A Decentralized and Scriptable Middleware for Smart Energy Buildings

Buildings, with their different subsystems interacting with diverse occupants, constitute a complex Cyber-Physical- Human infrastructure. Monitoring and controlling this complex ecosystem is essential both for efficient and optimized operations of building subsystems and for influencing the occupant behavior. A critical enabling technology in this case is a middleware system for buildings that can provide support for deriving rich inferences by fusing and analyzing intentionally acquired or opportunistically available data from diverse embedded sensors, human feedback, and existing building subsystems. This paper presents SensorAct, a decentralized and scriptable middleware system architecture for developing and scheduling various energy management applications for smart buildings. In addition to providing support for managing and integrating heterogeneous sensing and actuation systems in buildings, SensorAct provides two emerging features: 1) a scripting framework for extending and automating the energy management functions of the modern buildings, and 2) a rule-based sensor data and control sharing mechanism for fine-grained sharing for building owners. We describe the detailed system architecture and design, and provide proof of concept through multiple third party applications built using SensorAct APIs and deployment in diverse settings across India and United States. SensorAct is released in open source for community use.