IoT Digital Twin Graph Modeling for Building Device Discovery
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current building automation systems face challenges in accurately modeling many-to-many relationships between physical entities in commercial buildings, limited by parent-child relationship models and centralized architectures that lead to complexity, bottlenecks, and inefficiencies in data processing and analytics.
Innovation Solution
A contextually-aware digital twin system using a graph database representation decouples devices and controllers, employing a label property graph and actor model to accurately model relationships and enable edge analytics and control, with an IoT Gateway for data normalization and integration across different manufacturers and protocols.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If a centralized architecture with parent-child relationship models is used to model building automation systems, then system integration and control are achieved, but device complexity and data processing bottlenecks increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the centralized building automation system into distributed microservices that can independently process data from different devices and controllers. Each microservice handles specific device types or functions, eliminating the single-point bottleneck of centralized architectures while maintaining system-wide integration through standardized communication protocols.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces an intermediary layer consisting of message brokers and event streams that mediate between devices/controllers and the central management system. This intermediary architecture enables asynchronous communication, decoupling devices from centralized processing and allowing parallel data handling without creating bottlenecks.
2Loss of information
If traditional graph database approaches are used to model building entities, then relationships between entities can be represented, but many-to-many relationships between physical entities cannot be accurately modeled
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extends traditional graph database modeling by adding temporal and contextual dimensions to entity relationships. Instead of static parent-child links, the system uses multi-dimensional relationship attributes that can represent many-to-many associations, device states over time, and contextual dependencies between building entities, enabling accurate modeling of complex building automation scenarios.
Data Source
AI summary
IoT devices within a commercial real-estate or residential building environment may be connected through networks, such as a Building Automation and Control network (BACnet). Systems and methods according to this disclosure provide automatic discovery of IoT devices and relationships in commercial real-estate and residential buildings and integration of the BACnet devices into the digital twin of the building. In some implementations, an IoT gateway is configured to translate the communication received from the BACnet to an IoT cloud platform and configured to normalize the data across the different security platforms into a consistent format which enables integration and interoperability of the different building system platforms that may otherwise be operating in isolation from each other. Systems and methods according to the present disclosure provide edge based analytics and control of IoT BACnet devices based on defining conditions and rules, and provide integration of multiple building systems in the context of commercial real-estate and residential buildings.