Building Graph Event Broker for Holistic System Management
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current building management systems lack dynamic, scalable, and adjustable solutions for holistic management of building systems, as discrete predefined controlling systems operate independently without knowledge of the building's overall state.
Innovation Solution
A cloud-based building system that receives events from building equipment, enriches them with contextual data, and provides enriched events to consuming applications, utilizing schema matching, graph projections, and change feeds to facilitate holistic management and communication across building subsystems.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If discrete predefined controlling systems are used for each building subsystem, then each subsystem can be controlled individually, but the system lacks holistic management capability and cannot dynamically adapt to building-wide conditions
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an event broker as an intermediary component that receives events from multiple building subsystems and distributes them to consuming applications. This mediator enables holistic management by coordinating information flow across subsystems without requiring complex direct integration between each subsystem, thus achieving versatility while managing complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The event broker serves multiple functions: receiving events from diverse sources, validating schemas, enriching events with contextual data, routing to multiple consumers, and maintaining event history. This multi-functional component enables holistic building management through a single universal platform rather than requiring separate control mechanisms for each subsystem.
2Adaptability or versatility
If predefined controlling systems are used, then implementation is straightforward, but the systems cannot provide dynamic and scalable solutions
Solution Approach 1:
The system employs dynamic event schemas and flexible subscription mechanisms that allow consuming applications to subscribe to specific event types based on their needs. New event sources and consumers can be added dynamically without reconfiguring the entire system, enabling scalability while maintaining ease of implementation through standardized interfaces.
Solution Approach 2:
The architecture segments the building management system into independent event producers, an event broker, and event consumers. Each component operates independently with well-defined interfaces, allowing individual subsystems to be modified, added, or removed without affecting others, thus providing dynamic scalability while keeping implementation straightforward.
3Loss of information
If events are enriched with contextual data from graph projections, then consuming applications receive comprehensive information, but the processing time and computational resources increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system pre-generates graph projections from the building graph database before events arrive. By preparing contextual data in advance through change feeds that automatically update projections when the building graph changes, the system avoids performing complex graph queries at event processing time, thus reducing latency while maintaining information completeness.
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements a feedback mechanism where consuming applications can request specific contextual data from the event broker. The broker queries the building graph database only for the specific contextual information needed for that event, rather than providing all possible contextual data, thus balancing information completeness with processing efficiency.
4Reliability
If schema validation is performed on all incoming events, then data quality is ensured, but events with new or unrecognized schemas are rejected
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements a discovery mode where the event broker automatically discovers and learns new event schemas from incoming events. When operating in discovery mode, the broker accepts events with unrecognized schemas, extracts their structure, and adds them to the schema registry. This self-learning capability ensures data quality for known schemas while automatically adapting to new event formats without manual intervention.
Data Source
AI summary
A building system of a building including one or more memory devices having instructions thereon, that, when executed by one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to identify a capability of an entity in a building graph, the building graph including a plurality of nodes and a plurality of edges, the plurality of nodes representing entities of the building including the entity and the capability, the plurality of edges representing relationships between the entities of the building and the capability. The instructions cause the one or more processors to receive a command to perform an operation associated with the entity, the operation associated with the capability of the entity and provide the command to perform the operation associated with the entity to an operating system.