Towards a robust solution in building automation systems: Supporting rapid prototyping and analysis

It is presently required agile and systematic solutions aiming at streamlining the development, maintenance and configuration of complex Building Automation Systems (BASs) in an energy aware manner. We aim at defining usable Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) using a Software Language Engineering (SLE), as systematic approach for language development, and develop the right tools for specifying the behavior of BASs components along with their energy-related requirements. The goal is to not only assist the systems engineers while rapid-prototyping/developing affordable, high-quality, energy-efficient(EE) BASs, but also to take advantage of high level abstractions, efficient special-purpose verification algorithms and analysis tools for early validation and verification, in order to promote Quality of the generated software products. We are watching to the rise of Model-Driven Development as the pragmatic approach to build them, since this approach is based on the notion of explicit abstractions/models. This is achieved thanks to model transformations that, besides automatically translating any specification of a given language into other execution specifications, also allow us to derive analysis specifications. The problem with the referred types of transformation purposes is that we cannot guarantee quality and coherence between the derived specifications into execution specifications and combine it with analysis specifications unless we can either make use of testing over the execution, with the problems already known, or have mechanisms to study the transformations. While this problem is motivated by the concrete need of developing BASs, we foresee that it can be of general application in SLE. In this position paper we will give a state of the art in Building Automation and we give an overview of a possible solution that uses MDD and model transformations, in the context of a BAS solution, in order to check their correctness in w.r.t. the formal semantics of the languages used in the target platforms (i.e either execution or analysis).