Fog BEMS: An Agent-Based Hierarchical Fog Layer Architecture for Improving Scalability in a Building Energy Management System

Uikyun Na and Eun-Kyu Lee
Additional contact information
Uikyun Na: College of Information Technology, Incheon National University, Incheon 22012, Korea
Eun-Kyu Lee: College of Information Technology, Incheon National University, Incheon 22012, Korea

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 7, 1-28

Abstract: It has been found that a cloud building energy management system (BEMS) alone cannot support increasing numbers of end devices (e.g., energy equipment and IoT devices) and emerging energy services efficiently. To resolve these limitations, this paper proposes Fog BEMS, which applies an emerging fog computing concept to a BEMS. Fog computing places small computing resources (fog nodes) just next to end devices, and these nodes process data in real time and manage local contexts. In this way, the BEMS becomes distributed and scalable. However, existing fog computing models have barely considered scenarios where many end devices and fog nodes are deployed and interconnected. That is, they do not scale up and cannot be applied to scalable applications like BEMS. To solve the problem, this paper (i) designs a fog network where a list of functionally heterogeneous nodes is deployed in a hierarchy for collaboration and (ii) designs an agent-based, modular programming model that eases the development and management of computing services at a fog node. We develop a prototype of a fog node and build a real-world testbed on a campus to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system. We also conduct experiments, and results show that Fog BEMS is scalable enough for a node to connect up to 900 devices and that network traffic is reduced by 27.22–97.63%, with varying numbers of end devices.

Keywords: building energy management system; fog computing; scalability; multi-agent system; Internet of Things; hierarchical architecture; distributed system (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/7/2831/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/7/2831/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:7:p:2831-:d:340629

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().