Abstract: Modern facility management hardware devices and software applications rarely live in isolation. Advents in embedded systems, distributed real-time computing, and networking allow integration of logical objects and physical object at various levels. For example, IP enabled HVAC devices and security sensors are the common trend at sensor and device level integration, and a single command control system for both HVAC and security system is available in many commercial products including Metasys™ from Johnson Controls, and EBI™ from Honeywell.
Such an integrated system, by its nature, is distributed and must be able to capture, encode, store, index, manage, retrieve and present data of diverse types (i.e., distributed heterogeneous time-critical multimedia data). Therefore, this new trend in building information management arises in which logical processing is very deeply interconnected with the distributed physical environment in which it occurs. In these integrated solutions, computing becomes more autonomous and less reliant on human input, intervention, and administration (e.g., they are common prerequisites for system integration to support “easy to use” and “easy to integrate”.). To fulfill such requirements, we must create or revise tangible real-life use case scenarios, vertical and horizontal integration frameworks, application level information sharing standards, and security models.
A brief summary of the current industry efforts on cyber-physical system integration, more specifically in the domain of security system integration is presented. We introduce Johnson Controls’ message oriented cyber-physical system integration architecture with information flow-oriented process management and outline much needed research and development challenges in this area.