BuildingRules: A trigger-action–based system to manage complex commercial buildings

Modern Building Management Systems (BMSs) have been designed to automate the behavior of complex buildings, but unfortunately they do not allow occupants to customize it according to their preferences, and only the facility manager is in charge of setting the building policies. To overcome this limitation, we present BuildingRules, a trigger-action programming-based system that aims to provide occupants of commercial buildings with the possibility of specifying the characteristics of their office environment through an intuitive interface. Trigger-action programming is intuitive to use and has been shown to be effective in meeting user requirements in home environments. To extend this intuitive interface to commercial buildings, an essential step is to manage the system scalability as large number of users will express their policies. BuildingRules has been designed to scale well for large commercial buildings as it automatically detects conflicts that occur among user specified policies and it supports intelligent grouping of rules to simplify the policies across large numbers of rooms. We ensure the conflict resolution is fast for a fluid user experience by using the Z3 SMT solver. BuildingRules backend is based on RESTful web services so it can connect to various BMSs and scale well with large number of buildings. We have tested our system with 23 users across 17 days in a virtual office building, and the results we have collected prove the effectiveness and the scalability of BuildingRules.