The Active Building Centre Research Programme have developed an open-source, event-driven microservice messaging architecture to enable collection of real time building data from a range of buildings and systems. The aim of the messaging infrastructure is to provide secure transmission of data in a consistent format between building devices and the cloud.
![](https://abc-rp.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/stack.png)
The conceptual diagram above describes the high level components of the messaging infrastructure. The focus of the work to date has primarily been on ensuring secure, consistent communications from a range of devices using a range of IoT and messaging services. This then allows a range of applications to sit on top of the stack depending on the objective, for example front-end analytics and dashboarding.
Evolution from Microservices to Event-Driven Microservices:
The stack was developed to be open-source, scalable and multi-tenant. It can run on either cloud or the edge, or a combination. The architecture for version 1 is shown below (no longer supported).
![](https://abc-rp.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/v1.png)
Recently an updated stack has been developed, this builds on Version 1 and makes the move to an event-driven implementation.
![](https://abc-rp.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/v2.png)
From microservices to event-driven microservices:
- Lower resource usage (power usage)
- Lower costs to operate
- Easier to scale
- Easier developer experience
Protocol normalization based on Cloud Events and Knative eventing:
- Emerging specifications for describing and handling events
- Portable across many platforms
Onboarding Guidance
For projects which are being onboarded to the ABC-RP infrastructure comprehensive guidance is available on Github. The guidance covers the key concepts of the messaging stack, in addition to providing examples and links to related projects.
![](https://abc-rp.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/onboarding.png)
Useful Links and Related Projects
Further information, particularly relating to naming, payload structuring and ontology may be found in the links below:
Building Device Naming Standard
Google Digital Buildings Project
Universal Device Management Interface (UDMI)
Project Partners
Industrial partners Arup and re.je were instrumental in developing Version 1 of the IoT messaging stack and are still involved in the project, helping to ensure that the project continues to align with other ongoing efforts and standards.
![](https://abc-rp.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/re.je-and-arup-1-1024x328.png)