BBDATA stands for Big Building Data and aims at developing a scalable cloud platform and tools for storing and processing smart building data. The project is realized in collaboration with the Smart Living Lab (SLL), a cross-school lab  in Fribourg aiming at developing the buildings of the future. BBDATA services are targeting data access, processing and analysis, using open, robust, standardized and secured big data technologies.

Numerous sensors and actuators are located in the different buildings of the blueFACTORY site. These sensors collect measurements such as temperature, humidity, presence, CO2, electricity consumption, etc. As these sensors are connected to different networks using heterogeneous protocols, gateways are integrated enabling a seamless and standardized way to communicate with all sensors and actuators as if they would be simple Internet of Things devices. Thus, research teams and projects of the SLL can easily exploit their recorded data using a unique and simple protocol.

BBDATA provides a shared cloud platform running Big Data technologies, enabling a low cost solution and a short time-to-research. The underlying infrastructure is powered by DAPLAB, our Hadoop cluster at iCoSys HEIA-FR.

BBDATA services also include processing capabilities and offer information visualization tools for understanding and communicating research results.

Update as of Sept 2019

BBDATA has been running without any faults for more than 2 years. It is now connected to more than 2’000 sensors located in the Halle Bleue and the Neighbourhub. Other projects have also started to use it as main storage and access facility for time series processing. In peak days, it is more than 10’000’000 values stored in BBDATA, representing billions of data every years. A decision has been taken to maintain a production version of BBDATA as part of the core research tools of the Smart Living Lab.

Publications

• L. Linder, D. Vionnet, J. Bacher, and J. Hennebert, “Big Building Data – a Big Data Platform for Smart Buildings,” Energy Procedia, vol. 122, pp. 589-594, 2017.
  [Bibtex]

  @article{2017lindercisbat,
  title = "Big Building Data - a Big Data Platform for Smart Buildings",
  journal = "Energy Procedia",
  volume = "122",
  pages = "589 - 594",
  year = "2017",
  note = "CISBAT 2017 International ConferenceFuture Buildings & Districts – Energy Efficiency from Nano to Urban Scale",
  issn = "1876-6102",
  doi = "10.1016/j.egypro.2017.07.354",
  url = "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1876610217329582",
  author = "Lucy Linder and Damien Vionnet and Jean-Philippe Bacher and Jean Hennebert",
  keywords = "Big Data, Building Management Systems, Smart Buildings, Web of Buildings",
  abstract = "Abstract Future buildings will more and more rely on advanced Building Management Systems (BMS) connected to a variety of sensors, actuators and dedicated networks. Their objectives are to observe the state of rooms and apply automated rules to preserve or increase comfort while economizing energy. In this work, we advocate for the inclusion of a dedicated system for sensors data storage and processing, based on Big Data technologies. This choice enables new potentials in terms of data analytics and applications development, the most obvious one being the ability to scale up seamlessly from one smart building to several, in the direction of smart areas and smart cities. We report in this paper on our system architecture and on several challenges we met in its elaboration, attempting to meet requirements of scalability, data processing, flexibility, interoperability and privacy. We also describe current and future end-user services that our platform will support, including historical data retrieval, visualisation, processing and alarms. The platform, called BBData - Big Building Data, is currently in production at the Smart Living Lab of Fribourg and is offered to several research teams to ease their work, to foster the sharing of historical data and to avoid that each project develops its own data gathering and processing pipeline."
  }