A service‐oriented architecture for building services integration
Abstract
Purpose
Traditional administration of building services regards them as having confined scope, operating in isolation or tightly coupled and providing minimal support for overall coordination and holistic management hindering the provisioning of advanced services. This approach inherently bears weaknesses related to complex services management, results in increased costs, and formulates rigid architectural design that restricts flexibility and extensibility. Taking into consideration this set of drawbacks, the purpose of this paper is to propose exploiting a service‐oriented architecture that will allow for dynamic, coordinated and distributed building services management.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper presents the design of an enterprise‐based networking architecture for building services and systems and specifies its functional components.
Findings
The proposed architecture is compliant with established practices in the building automation field and focuses on catering for a wide spectrum of building and enterprise level services. A specific deployment use‐case scenario and its related implementation issues is considered, so as to promote interoperability and adoption of open standards and principles for the system level performance evaluation of the proposed architecture is also examined.
Research limitations/implications
Literature review is not exhaustive and evaluation of the proposed architecture should be performed in a more systematic manner.
Practical implications
Adoption of a service‐oriented view as far as facilities management is concerned.
Originality/value
This paper identifies through a thorough literature review the research problems in the area of building services integration and proposes an approach to enable successful integration. The novelty of this work is based on the application of the state‐of‐the‐art in enterprise networking for integration of building management and IT‐based services.
Keywords
Citation
Malatras, A., Asgari, A.(H)., Baugé, T. and Irons, M. (2008), "A service‐oriented architecture for building services integration", Journal of Facilities Management, Vol. 6 No. 2, pp. 132-151. https://doi.org/10.1108/14725960810872659
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2008, Emerald Group Publishing Limited