The Smart Building requires an specific OS like the Smartphone in its time to truly become smart and not only connected.

1. The Smart Building
requires its own
Operating System (OS)!
2019
SPINALCOM |www.spinalcom.com

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The Smart Building
The Smart (or Digital) Building is still a concept, more than reality. Some of the main reasons
are:
 There is a lack of compelling business reasons as to why a Smart Building is worth its
investment in design, construction, programming deployment and ongoing support.
 There is no clear and complete definition of a Smart Building in terms of its building
blocks: the hardware, software and the business applications.
 The lack of maturity regarding many of these building blocks.
 The lack of software architecture and development experience and expertise in the
building industry.
The purpose of this article is not to answer all these questions, but to better define the
foundation which is essential for the realization of the era of Smart Buildings, the BOS (Building
Operating System). Recently the term BOS has become an increasingly popular term in the field
of Smart Buildings. A growing number of players understand that the industrialization of a
digitalization approach must be supported by the creation of software platforms that facilitate
the development, deployment and use of digital applications to enable the Smart Building.
From mobile phone to smartphone
What differentiates a mobile phone from a smartphone? The first difference, as a user, is that
the original mobile digital phone provided three functions: making calls, texting and playing
simple games. The smartphone introduced the concept of apps that could perform an
unlimited number of functions. The smartphone is an open platform providing a platform for
creative people to design and develop highly useful and productive applications to anyone
carrying a smartphone.
What is the foundation that facilitates the development, deployment and use of smartphone
applications? It’s the OS: iOS, Android OS, Windows Mobile…
From Automated Building to Smart Building
What differentiates a building from a Smart Building?
Current buildings offer specific functions that exist in silo: the BMS, access control, security
systems, audio-video systems, lighting, environmental control, maintenance management,
space management and others.
Like smartphones, one day Smart Buildings will provide hundreds or thousands of applications
that benefit the building occupants, operators and owners in ways we can’t imagine today.
Many of the apps on smartphones today, we could not have imagined them back in the days
of the simple mobile phone.

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Today’s buildings provide a variety of limited siloed functions designed decades ago that
provide and serve basic and traditional building needs. Tomorrow’s Smart Building will be an
open platform for the development, deployment and use of a broad number of applications
only limited by the creativity of the designers and developers of the apps.
Following the evolution of the smartphone, what the Smart Building needs in order to facilitate
the development, deployment and use of digital applications is clearly the BOS!
What is the BOS?
The BOS is the core software platform required for the industrialization of the building
digitalization process. Without a BOS, there is no foundation on which to realize the future of
Smart Buildings.

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The BOS is a software platform with the following subsystems:
AEP: Application
Enablement Platform
Software Development Kit (SDK) and documented Application
Programming Interfaces (APIs) enabling application developments,
data model enrichment, and integration with any third-party
systems
Real-time distributed
graph database
Real-time management of the digital twin of the building (avatar) to
provide an accurate description of the building semantics which is
updated from field data (BMS, IoT …).
The ability to manage BIM model in real-time is fully related to this
competence!
Distributed
orchestration
system
Automatic synchronization of modified data and event
management for the orchestration of processes (applications,
analytics, piloting ...) distributed within the different building
systems
Rights management
system
Data access control of the digital twin and of its different
applications
Onsite/local
deployment
To manage real-time aspects, data privacy, system resilience and
data flow constraints...
Ref: Table a1
 Do the BOS platforms on the market today offer all the required subsystems and
functions to enable the smart building?
 Do you understand why those requirements are essential in a qualified BOS platform,
and more generally for the management of the software infrastructure of your digital
building?
 Do you know how to qualify the reality of these requirements?
Several companies have positioned their solutions as a BOS and new ones will come. However,
instead of simplifying the understanding of this concept, it disturbs it since they are so difficult
to compare, since their nature differs and since the marketing aspects sometimes take
precedence over the actual technical capabilities.
To answer the previous questions, my first advice is to collaborate with a digital expert (a digital
service company for example) to qualify the solutions but also when implementing Smart
Building solutions. The B2B digital market is already mature. It is already structured by players
with well-defined roles and skills (IT consultant, IT Architect, IT integrator, IT operator ...). These
players will play an essential role in the digital building industry.
For the rest, this article aims to strengthen your understanding of the BOS by addressing two
issues:
 What is the BOS for?
 How to position the BOS compared to other platforms?

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What is the BOS for?
The BOS facilitates, accelerates and organizes the development, deployment and use of digital
applications in the building. The BOS transforms your building, or asset, into a digital service
platform.
What are the reasons behind the digital transformation of the building?
 a user seeks to have more comfort, more services. To make sure to use the building as
a living space adapted to his needs.
 a tenant seeks to reduce his operational costs and make the building a tool to improve
the productivity of his business, a showcase of his ambitions or an attractive place for
the talents to attract ...
 an investor seeks to increase and maintain the value of his asset, simplify transactions,
distinguish himself from the competition ...
 a facility manager seeks to optimize his maintenance actions, facilitate the search for
information, convince its client of the usefulness of a specific investment ...
Still, additional needs will not fail to come up! The numerous digital services to be deployed are
difficult to quantify. Yet the promise of digital building is ultimately to provide all of these digital
services.
It is important to understand and share the above observation to consider the usefulness and
value of the BOS. Indeed, the deployment of digital services in the building is not really a
novelty. On the other hand, the proliferation of applications using and generating large volumes
of heterogeneous data is new and creates a new scale of complexity.
The BOS is primarily used to manage this complexity. It simplifies the development, deployment
and use of this multitude of applications and at the same time, it industrializes the digitization
approach of the building digital services.
Positioning the BOS in its environment
The term platform is often used to talk about the BOS. Indeed, the BOS is a platform with
specific positioning, but not all platforms can be positioned as a BOS!
In this chapter, I will introduce the overall organization of the Smart Building information
system and position the BOS in relation to other platforms, applications, databases (BIM, BMS,
Big data platform, Cloud applications) ...

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Where is the BOS acting?
In a Smart Building, we can identify at least three types of digital platforms that operate at three
different architecture layers:
 Field or equipment layer: like BMS automates, Audio/Video, Video surveillance and
more generally "automated systems"...
 Building layer: like the BMS supervision, space management, BIM model ...
 Real estate layer: like web services, hypervisor for several buildings, CMMS, mobile
application portal, real estate management systems ...
We can often make the following associations between those three layers of architecture:
 Real estate layer → cloud computing
 Building layer → fog or edge computing
 Equipment layer → field computing
The BOS is a platform that works at the building layer (fog). It is a platform intimately associated
with the building that allows to know better, understand better, control better your building and
make it digitally upgradable.
From a technical point of view, the BOS is a software platform that streamlines data
management and orchestrates the operation of building-wide applications. It is the missing link
between the field and real estate layers.

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How to differentiate BOS from other platforms?
The BOS versus Cloud Big Data Platforms
The BOS is, for big data cloud platforms, what Windows is
to Azure and Android is to Google drive. The BOS manages
the "building" assets and exchanges data with the Cloud
services.
Thanks to the BOS, the building becomes smart, it is not
only connected to a smart cloud platform.
The BOS value prop versus those Cloud tools are:
 real-time data management
 local resilience of the system
 confidentiality management (secured by design)
 very fine-grained description of the assets
The BOS versus the BMS
The BOS operates over the BMS and other field silos
systems (A/V, access control, network equipment, IoT
sensors/actuators ...). It exchanges data with each of the
field systems via specific APIs, drivers or protocols (ideally
open ones).
The BOS approach is transforming the monitoring tools
deployment. Indeed, there is a partial overlap between the
databases of the different building systems and the BOS one. New supervision interfaces will
emerge as applications running over the BOS.
The BOS value prop versus those BMS supervisors are:
 provides a single repository of the building description enabling to connect and
compare data from multiple business silos
 adds a layer of data semantics and contextualization to make the data understandable
and easily usable (richer database management system)
 provides an SDK and API which makes it an AEP (Application Enablement Platform). This
means that any software developers can easily develop new applications by valuing the
data coming from the different silos.

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The BOS versus the BIM model
The BIM model is a great source of geo-
located data graph (of the building)
that also offers 3D graphical tools to
build and browse this graph (database).
Therefore, the BIM model can be used
in two ways by the BOS:
 as an external source of information with which the BOS can exchange data,
 as a tool to initialize the dynamic data graph of the BOS, what we call the digital twin of
the building.
The BOS value prop versus BIM model are:
 the BOS provides an open, dynamic and editable real-time database management
system
 the BOS connects BIM data with other building data sources
 the BOS is an AEP. It comes with an SDK for the development and deployment of digital
applications using data from the BIM model.
The BOS and CMMS or IWMS
The BOS can be connected with a CMMS,
IWMS ... and can exchange data with those
systems (having open APIs).
The CMMS or IWMS are applications (or
application platforms) that operate mainly on
a real-estate layer and only provide a partial
description of the building. The BOS is a
building platform that brings a very precise knowledge of the building. There is partial overlap
between the IWMS / CMMS and the BOS databases, which allows both environments
(platforms) to communicate together.
The value prop of the BOS over CMMS/IWMS are:
 the BOS provides a link between real-time field systems and CMMS or IWMS
 the BOS is the heart of the building information system. It brings a more detailed
knowledge of the building and runs as "the building server"
 the BOS is an AEP. It comes with an SDK enabling a constant evolution of the building
information system.

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Which components make up the BOS?
We finally return to the table proposed at the beginning of the article. To be considered as a
BOS, the platform must provide you with the technical competences described in the previous
diagram:
An Application Enablement Platform (AEP):
 an open and documented Software Development Kit (SDK) enabling the enrichment of
data models and application developments,
 open and documented Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) enabling integration
with third-party systems
A real-time graph database management system:
The heart of the system must enable the management of the complete building data model (as
called the digital twin):
 the precise description of the semantics of the complex system (your building). The BIM
model provides a rich building semantic which is modeled as a data graph.
 the ability to consume IoT / BMS data, which requires dynamic, almost real-time
management competences.
A distributed processes orchestration system:
Unlike a computer or a smartphone, a building is a distributed complex system. The BOS must
be able to manage acquisition processes on each floor, analysis processes in separate server
rooms, user interfaces on any support ...

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A secure rights management system:
The profiles involved in the BOS are numerous: administrators, integrators, maintainers, users,
asset managers ... Each must have specific rights on parts or subparts of the digital twin and on
the applications enabling its update.
The capacity to be deployed locally:
A building is an industrial asset. The data produced by its occupants and its systems can be
numerous, confidential, real time ... The applications deployed can be critical or not, need a
high level of resilience or not ... For all these reasons, and for the building to be itself smart -
and not just connected to a smart system - the BOS must be deployed locally on the building.
Conclusion
The BOS is the core of the smart building information system. It facilitates the creation of the
complete information system, enriches the value of each application, structures and links the
data coming from several sources of information, orchestrates the data analytics and data
exchange processes…
The BOS’s objective is to manage this complex asset (the building) to make it a scalable digital
platform offering digital services with tangible added value.
The BOS may seem complex for non-developers. It is however just up to the complexity of the
building itself, its value and the results expected by a Smart Building approach.
Simpler solutions will bring you very few added values. The BOS is part of a much more
ambitious process. It aims to transform your building into a smart asset and thereby bring out
the potential value that this concept of Smart Building promises!
Author Information:
Jérémie Bellec, co-founder and CEO of Spinalcom, has a Phd in computational mechanics at the
"Ecole Normale Supérieure of Cachan (France)" and provides courses on intelligent information
systems at the Executive Education of the "Ecole Polytechnique".
Jérémie has been working since 2007 on dynamic digital twin and edge or fog computing. First,
in the aeronautical vertical where he developed, for nearly 6 years, the Spinalcore platform as
a "distributed OS". Then, in the field of digital building since 2015 where he created the concept
of BOS. Spinalcom, member of the Smart Building Alliance, is deploying its BOS today as well as
several applications (CDE for Handover, Building Operation Center ...) on several customers like
EDF, Vinci Energies, SUEZ, Spie Batignolles, GSE …