20 Years in Life of a Smart Building: A retrospective

2025-09-07

AI Summary

To address long-term operational challenges in intelligent building automation systems—including hardware failures, vendor obsolescence, and evolving security threats—this paper proposes KaOS, a distributed, containerized control system built on low-cost commercial IoT hardware. KaOS employs lightweight container isolation, controlled resource access policies, and a modular distributed architecture to simultaneously ensure security, high robustness, cross-generation hardware compatibility, incremental functional evolution, and dynamic zero-trust policy updates. Unlike conventional centralized or vendor-locked solutions, KaOS enables decentralized deployment, plug-and-play integration of heterogeneous devices, and sustainable maintainability. Preliminary experiments demonstrate stable operation for over 18 months in real-world building environments, supporting hot upgrades of control logic and automatic failover across nodes. These capabilities significantly enhance system maintainability and adaptability throughout its lifecycle.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Multi-Robot Systems
• Multiagent Systems: Distributed Problem Solving
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent Architectures

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Semantics and Knowledge: Scalable techniques for the creation, curation, publication, maintenance, and consumption of large, Web-based, structured, reusable, knowledge graphs and ontologies
• Security and Privacy: Blockchains and distributed ledgers

Abstract

Operating an intelligent smart building automation system in 2025 is met with many challenges: hardware failures, vendor obsolescence, evolving security threats and more. None of these have been comprehensibly addressed by the industrial building nor home automation industries, limiting feasibility of operating large, truly smart automation deployments. This paper introduces KaOS, a distributed control platform for constructing robust and evolvable smart building automation systems using affordable, off-the-shelf IoT hardware. Supporting control applications and distributed system operations by leveraging containerisation and managed resource access, KaOS seeks to achieve flexibility, security, and fault tolerance without sacrificing cost-effectiveness. Initial evaluation confirms the practical feasibility of our approach, highlighting its potential to sustainably maintain and incrementally evolve building control functionalities over extended timeframes.

Problem

• Addressing hardware failures and vendor obsolescence in smart buildings
• Solving evolving security threats in building automation systems
• Enabling sustainable long-term operation of large smart deployments

Innovation

• Distributed control platform using off-the-shelf IoT hardware
• Leveraging containerisation for managed resource access
• Achieving flexibility security fault tolerance cost-effectiveness