Demo: BACChat: A Building Automation Control Client for Sensor Data Collection

Nowadays, many buildings are equipped with a building management system (BMS), which plays a key role in maintaining the operation, energy efficiency, and safety of a building. With the rising concerns in energy conservation and the fact that buildings are major energy consumers, there is an increasing interest in studies on building management systems in computing society. One key difficulty we found in BMS research is that a BMS system is very complex, and there is very few tools for researchers to flexibly the interaction with a BMS system. We developed Building Automation Control Chat (BACChat) for a BMS system. The BACChat is the client side of BMS, which can interact with the sensing devices of a BMS system. Such operation was not possible because all the BMS operation software are developed by private vendors. We released BACChat as an open source. It can be used for many research problems. For example, we plan to redesign part of the BMS system using wireless sensors; so as to reduce deployment effort and costs. As such, our BACChat is an indispensable component for our system. We also found that data loss occurs when we are using existing software; but we are short of tools to diagnose the problem, therefore, BACChat is useful in such situation. In this demo, we will help our audience from the computing field to better understand the existing BMS system. We will show how BACChat can be used for research studies.