Anyone designing an IoT architecture must decide which tasks are best performed locally by a device at the network’s edge versus remotely by a cloud-hosted application. Within the IT world, an edge device is defined as a gateway or global controller. Within the building automation world, a direct digital controller (DDC) can be considered an edge controller. Likewise, a global controller is an edge controller.
One of the most revolutionary aspects of having robust compute resources at the DDC level is that these edge devices can do analytics processing of large data sets. Application developers are challenged to make the most of this new capability. The Buildings-IoT represents an opportunity to radically rethink the software architectures that define the core
* Work in progress workflows such as detecting and diagnosing faults in equipment,
responding to occupant hot/cold calls, shifting energy loads to participate in demand response programs, and performing other building operations management tasks. Energy Analytics Controllers are capable of high-speed handling of the work involved in trending data, adding semantic tagging and generating analytics. Doing these tasks locally and sharing the results among other edge devices, opens the path to a host of new applications