Solution Summary

The Mediator™ is a middleware solution comprised of both hardware and software. This domain agnostic integration framework is able to communicate with a number of disparate protocols. The MPX software framework plays a central role in the integration process by normalizing both IP and legacy serial based protocols, which in turn allows for intra-protocol communication, the uniform application of services such as logging, and the common presentation of information that is sourced from the array of intelligent machines found in buildings.

Using the Mediator’s embedded suite of tools, custom web-pages may be designed and hosted on the Mediator that are then used to present a window into the real-time condition of building systems. Alarms, logs, control sequences and other common features may also be configured using these tools. And since the Mediator abstracts and treats all data in the same manner, there is no special distinction or friction associated with creating user defined causal relationships between sub-systems. Any value or combination of values taken from the HVAC, Lighting, Electrical or any other system, can change the operation of others.

Since all points within the framework are identified by a unique identifier (URI) and all information can be presented in common formats, such as HTML or XML-RPC, the Mediator allows for a number of other parties to securely consume and manipulate this information. These different parties might include both operations staff performing diagnostics and executives examining customer reports via their browser. These benefits might also be extended to tenants controlling their personal environment via their Cisco phone, other intelligent machines performing automated operations, or even value add service providers that specialize in specific areas such as predictive maintenance or energy management. The point being, that once this data has been liberated by the Mediator and these disparate protocols represented in a uniform IP-centric fashion, then all of the information from these systems, which exist in virtually every building in the world, can now be leveraged for the sole benefit of improving operations.

Figure 1. This illustrates the role of the Mediator within a building from a network design perspective. In addition to supporting a number of IP based services and protocols, the Mediator is uniquely positioned to extend what has been traditionally been considered the network edge, to serial based devices that currently occupy building's all over the world.

Figure 2. The Mediator extracts data from a variety of different physical interfaces, determines semantics through its multi-protocol support, applies domain-centric attributes and proffers this information to a variety of different consumers. Though the value of the information certainly increases as one progresses towards the top of this illustration, it builds from the critical foundation of protocol agnosticism. Central to this value proposition is the Mediator's MPX, which abstracts the data into a common object model, allowing for uniform processing, presentation and sharing of data between sub-systems.

Value Proposition

The value of the Mediator can be highlighted by the following points:

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