DIEM Thesis: Interfacing DPWS and oBIX building automation systems

Building Automation Work Package and Department of Automation and Systems Technology of Aalto University present a new DIEM related Master of Science thesis "Interfacing DPWS and oBIX building automation systems" by Henri Biström.

The goal of the research is to explore the interoperability opportunities of two modern Web services based building automation integration technologies, DPWS and oBIX. More specifically this project aims to enable adding DPWS field devices to a building automation system managed with an oBIX based management level system.

DPWS and oBIX are high level protocols built on top the common Internet technologies. Practical interoperability between them essentially requires a gateway capable of translating messages from one protocol to the other. The protocols’ data models are hence carefully examined and a theory for mapping the various data constructs between them is developed. Also practical algorithms for performing the translation are presented.

A gateway is developed by implementing the translation theory and algorithms in software. Simple test cases are constructed to aid the development and to verify that the theory works also in practice. The gateway is realized as a Java servlet and thus written in the Java programming language. Third-party open source components are used for some functionality, but an oBIX server and the translation code are written in the project.

It is concluded that the automatic translation from DPWS to oBIX is possible in many cases, but due to some fundamental incompatibilities not all constructs and concepts can be viably translated in a generic way. As for the viability of using the developed gateway itself or some other implementation of the translation theory as a part of a building automation system, the common considerations with respect to gateways apply.