Data Management System
The SinBerBEST Testbed manages experiments and experimental data using mainly two software applications. These are the Testbed Building Management Services Application (TBMSvc) and the SinBerBEST PI System (SBB PI).
The Testbed Building Management Services (TBMSvc) application is a customized Building Management System (BMS) that forms the central Command-Configure-Monitor platform for all devices and sub-systems in the SinBerBEST Testbed. Because of very specific and unconventional needs of the Testbed, the TBMSvc was custom built by SinBerBEST as an open-source web application.
The SinBerBEST PI System is the primary historian system for storing and managing experimental time-series data. At its core is the OSISoft PI System, which is a well-known data historian system in the Oil and Gas and Pharmaceutical industries. It is a windows-based system with industry standard big data processing and analytics capabilities. The main advantage of using the OSISoft PI System is the ease of integration with low-level systems using its comprehensive library of interfaces. Thus, system integration of various types of sensors, actuators and sub-systems that are adopted by SinBerBEST (ACMV, Lighting, etc.), which would traditionally have required a lot of software development effort, is made easy with the use of PI OSISoft platform.
The schematic in figure shows the various components of the SinBerBEST testbed and the information pathways connecting them and the TBMSvc and PI system.
For basic data manipulation and management, we employ the PI Systems Visualization and Extract Transform and Load (ETL) tools like PI Datalink, PI System Explorer and PI Vision. This collection of tools allows the real-time monitoring of an experiment in the Testbed. The TBMSvc and PI system together enable us to fully automate an experiment in the Testbed. The researcher can monitor the progress in real-time and download the stored data for analysis offline.