Why Are Smart Buildings Still Dumb: The Road Ahead

Industrial and home building automation industries share a common goal: transforming passive buildings into smart environments capable of efficient resource usage and increased user comfort. Both have so far failed to enable operation of truly smart automation deployments, although facing different challenges. Industrial systems are robust but rigid, whereas home automation systems are more flexible but unreliable - could we have the best of both worlds? We propose KaOS: a distributed control platform built around three key concepts: running the control architecture in the form of portable containerised control tasks, managed communication channels with guarantees to support dataflows between them and a distributed operations platform to enable incremental change of control goals and its deployment.