The vast number of facility management systems, home automation systems, and the ever-increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices are in constant need of environmental monitoring. Indoor environment data can be uti- lized to improve indoor facilities and better occupants’ working and living experience, however, such data are scarce because many existing facility monitoring technologies are expensive and proprietary for certain building systems. With the aim of addressing the indoor environment data availability issue, the authors designed and prototyped a cost-effective, distributed, scalable, and portable indoor environmental data collection system, Building Data Lite (BDL). BDL is based on Raspberry Pi computers and multiple changeable arrays of sensors, such as sensors of temperature, humidity, light, motion, sound, vibration, and multiple types of gases. The system includes a distributed sensing network and a centralized server. The server provides a web-based graphical user interface that enables users to access the collected data over the Internet. To evaluate the BDL system’s functionality, cost effectiveness, scalability, and portability, the research team conducted a case study in an affordable housing community where the system prototype is deployed to 12 households. The results indicate that the system is functioning as designed, costs $73 per zone and provides 12 types of indoor environment data, is easy to scale up, and is fully portable. This research contributes to the body of knowledge by proposing an innovative way for establishing a distributed wireless IoT data infrastructure for indoor environment sensing in new or existing buildings.
As buildings evolve towards the envisioned smart building paradigm, smart buildings’ cybersecurity issues and physical security issues are mingling. Although research studies have been conducted to detect and prevent physical (or cyber) intrusions to smart building systems (SBS), it is still unknown (1) how one type of intrusion facilitates the other, and (2) how such synergic attacks compromise the security protection of whole systems. To investigate both research questions, the authors propose a graph-based testbed to simulate cyber-physical attacks on smart buildings. The testbed models both cyber and physical accesses of a smart building in an integrated graph and simulates diverse cyber-physical attacks to assess their synergic impacts on the building and its systems. In this paper, the authors present the testbed design and the developed prototype, SHSim. An experiment is conducted to simulate attacks on multiple smart home designs and to demonstrate the functions and feasibility of the proposed simulation system.