Information Service Platform for Clustered BEMS of Yokohama Smart City Project

A conventional building energy management system (BEMS) can acquire and process data from tens of thousands of points at a time, but lacks the capability to serve as a clustered BEMS that is required to monitor and control more than 10 times that number of data points in a group of buildings.

To address the needs of a clustered BEMS, Toshiba has developed a scheduling algorithm for collecting data from building facilities and a common data interface for using the collected data. The scheduling algorithm determines when to transmit data requests, considering response delays from facilities and network throughputs, thereby increasing the volume of data that can be processed in each sampling slot. The common data interface makes it possible to hide the database structure from applications when providing them with a Web application programming interface (API), eliminating the need to modify applications in order to extend the functionality of the database (DB).

We have employed these technologies to construct an information service platform for data collection, and integrated various BEMS applications onto this platform to create a clustered BEMS. The newly developed clustered BEMS has been deployed as an experimental system for the Yokohama Smart City Project (YSCP) to demonstrate its ability to integrate data from a group of buildings.

Our next step is to realize new community services, including automated demand response and equipment diagnosis.

Outline of information service platform for clustered BEMS of Yokohama Smart City Project (YSCP)