Towards an emulation tool based on ontologies and data life cycles for studying smart buildings

In this paper, we share our vision to study a complex Information Technology (IT) system handling a massive amount of data in the context of 'smart buildings.' One technique for analyzing complex IT systems relies on emulation, where the final software system is fully deployed on real architectures, and is evaluated in considering "small" instances of situations the system is supposed to solve. We propose a software architecture for studying the ecosystem of 'smart buildings'. This software architecture is built: 1) on top of ontologies for the description of smart buildings; 2) on a special tool for mastering the life cycle of data produced by sensors and actuators inside the buildings. We assume that it is equally important to model both the building's components and the flow of data produced inside the building. We use existing software components for both goals and to make real our concerns. According to a translational methodology, we also discuss use cases for illustrating the potential of our approach and the particular challenges associated with making the two main components of our emulation tool inter-operate. Therefore, our main contribution is to propose a comprehensive, ambitious and realistic research plan to guide communities. The paper illustrates how computer scientists and smart buildings domain scientists may communicate to address and solve specific research problems related to Big Data in emergent distributed environments. We are also guessing that experimental results that can demonstrate the practicality of the proposed combination of tools could be devised in the future, based on our broad vision. The paper is, first and foremost, a visionary paper.