Visualizing BACnet data to facilitate humans in building-security decision-making

Building automation systems (BAS) are interlinked networks of hardware and software, which monitor and control events in the buildings. One of the data communication protocols used in BAS is Building Automation and Control networking protocol (BACnet) which is an internationally adopted ISO standard for the communication between BAS devices. Although BAS focus on providing safety for inhabitants, decreasing the energy consumption of buildings and reducing their operational cost, their security suffers due to the inherent complexity of the modern day systems. The issues such as monitoring of BAS effectively present a significant challenge, i.e., BAS operators generally possess only partial situation awareness. Especially in large and inter-connected buildings, the operators face the challenge of spotting meaningful incidents within large amounts of simultaneously occurring events, causing the anomalies in the BAS network to go unobserved. In this paper, we present the techniques to analyze and visualize the data for several events from BAS devices in a way that determines the potential importance of such unusual events and helps with the building-security decision making. We implemented these techniques as a mobile (Android) based application for displaying application data and as tools to analyze the communication flows using directed graphs.