Welcome to the BBData docs

BBData, short for Big Building Data is a common platform for acquisition, storage, processing and sharing of smart building datas. The whole project is relying on open source scalable information systems running on Hadoop and other big data technologies.

Why BBData?

Smart building technologies provide new ways for the owners, operators and facility managers to improve both the reliability and performances of building assets. Used properly, it can lead to more efficient use of energy without compromising comfort.

Future buildings will more and more rely on a variety of sensors, actuators and dedicated networks to observe the state of the rooms and apply automated rules for controlling the equipments. An objective is also to scale up systems for multiple buildings towards smart areas and smart cities taking into account mobility and local energy production and storage.

We currently observe several challenges in the elaboration of smart buildings environments. First, sensors and actuators manufacturers follow different communication and data encoding standards, which leads to complex heterogenous systems. Second, the density of sensors and actuators as well as the sensing frequency tend to increase for a finer observation and control of the equipments, leading to large quantities of data to process. Third, advanced control, monitoring and post occupancy evaluation are relying on more and more complex models relying on historical data, aggregations and correlations in the range of several years.

These considerations is a the genesis of the BBData project. Developed by the Smart Living Lab with interdisciplinary groups from EPFL, University and Engineering School of Fribourg, this platform is meant to ease the work, to foster the sharing of historical data and to avoid that each project develops its own data gathering and processing pipeline.

BBData, only for smart buildings?

While BBData was first initiated with Smart Building platforms in mind, it has now evolved to be more flexible and open. Indeed, the technology-agnostic storage, the aggregation tools and query APIs it proposes are not limited to big building datas, but can host data from any device, as long as they are translatable into the BBData abstractions.

Documentation overview

This site hosts many informations about the BBData project. You will find information on its architecture and design choices, tutorials and resources to get started and much more.