Automation of Facility Management Processes Using Machine-to-Machine Technologies
The emergence of machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies as a business opportunity is based on the observation that there are many more machines and objects in the world than people and that an everyday object has more value when it is networked. In this pa
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Deutsche Telekom Laboratories at Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel {ansono,sapirlio,chanan,roism,shubi}@bgu.ac.il 2 Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Berlin, Germany {sudha.krishnamurthy,kilian.schloeder}@telekom.de
Abstract. The emergence of machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies as a business opportunity is based on the observation that there are many more machines and objects in the world than people and that an everyday object has more value when it is networked. In this paper, we describe an M2M middleware that we have developed for a facility management application. Facility management is a time and labour-intensive service industry, which can greatly benefit from the use of M2M technologies for automating business processes. The need to manage diverse facilities motivates several requirements, such as predictive maintenance, inventory management, access control, location tracking, and remote monitoring, for which an M2M solution would be useful. Our middleware includes software modules for interfacing with intelligent devices that are deployed in customer facilities to sense real-world conditions and control physical devices; communication modules for relaying data from the devices in the customer premises to a centralized data center; and service modules that analyze the data and trigger business events. We also present performance results of our middleware using our testbed and show that our middleware is capable of scalably and reliably handling concurrent events generated by different types of M2M devices, such as RFID tags, Zigbee sensors, and location tracking tags.
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Introduction
Machine to Machine (M2M) is a term used to describe the technologies that enable smart sensors, actuators, mobile devices, and back-end servers to communicate with each other, for the purposes of remotely controlling and configuring the machines (telematics), remotely monitoring/collecting data from machines (telemetry), and making decisions based on the collected data and sending notifications of unusual situations - often without human intervention. The emergence of M2M technologies as a business opportunity is based on the observation that there are many more machines - defined as things with mechanical, electrical, or electronic properties - than people, and that not only does a machine have more value when it is networked, but that the network becomes more valuable as C. Floerkemeier et al. (Eds.): IOT 2008, LNCS 4952, pp. 68–86, 2008. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008
Automation of Facility Management Processes
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more machines are connected. Harbor Research, a technology consultancy and analysis firm, estimates that by 2010, at least 1.5 billion devices will be connected to the Internet worldwide and this will include devices in the millions of households across the world. Over 45 million new cars are being produced every year and increasingly these are being built with embedded electronic networking capabilities for diagnostics, communications and so on. If we add to this the millions of vending machine
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