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Mortar: An Open Testbed for Portable Building Analytics

Published: 06 December 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Access to large amounts of real-world data has long been a barrier to the development and evaluation of analytics applications for the built environment. Open datasets exist, but they are limited in their span (how much data is available) and context (what kind of data is available and how it is described). Evaluation of such analytics is also limited by how the analytics themselves are implemented, often using hard-coded names of building components, points and locations, or unique input data formats.
To advance the methodology for how such analytics are implemented and evaluated, we present Mortar: an open testbed for portable building analytics, currently spanning 90 buildings and containing over 9.1 billion data points. All buildings in the testbed are described using Brick, a recently developed metadata schema, providing rich functional descriptions of building assets and subsystems. We also propose a simple architecture for writing portable analytics applications that are robust to the diversity of buildings and can configure themselves based on context. We demonstrate the utility of Mortar by implementing 11 applications from the literature.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks
ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks  Volume 16, Issue 1
February 2020
351 pages
ISSN:1550-4859
EISSN:1550-4867
DOI:10.1145/3368392
Issue’s Table of Contents
Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM acknowledges that this contribution was authored or co-authored by an employee, contractor or affiliate of the United States government. As such, the Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to publish or reproduce this article, or to allow others to do so, for Government purposes only.

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 06 December 2019
Accepted: 01 October 2019
Revised: 01 September 2019
Received: 01 March 2019
Published in TOSN Volume 16, Issue 1

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Author Tags

  1. Smart buildings
  2. dataset
  3. modeling and analytics

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  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed

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  • one of six centers in JUMP
  • Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC)
  • California Energy Commission
  • CONIX Research Center
  • Department of Energy
  • DARPA

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  • (2024)A hybrid actor- and microservices-based platform for scalable smart building application deploymentProceedings of the 11th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation10.1145/3671127.3698788(291-296)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Ontologies at Work: Analyzing Information Requirements for Model Predictive Control in BuildingsProceedings of the 11th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation10.1145/3671127.3698189(214-218)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2024
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