Turning light bulbs into objects
Bernd Bruegge, T. R. Fenton, Tae Wook Kim, Ricardo Pravia, Aseem Sharma, Benedict Fernandes, Seongju Chang, Volker Hartkopf · 1997
40% of the United States' energy is used for heating, cooling, ventilating, and lighting buildings.Given the efficacy of current righting systems of about 2-6% when measured from the power plant, we are wasting a lot of energy.In this context, the goal of the OWL (Object-oriented Workplace Laboratory) system is to provide a testbed that supports the operation of buildings with more efficient lighting systems.OWL's software architecture is based on a tiework using a combination of web and object technology.It offers location-transparent and manufacturer-independent access to a variety of lighting systems.The OWL system supports a user-driven lighting control scheme for the Intelligent Workplace at Carnegie Mellon University.Both on-line remote control and diagnosis of lighting systems are facilitated by the system.With OWL, a lighting fixture failme triggers a "push" type notification event and sends it to a process for further diagnosis and treatment, This paper describes the requirements, design decisions, and the implementation specific experience in the OWL system development.We discuss the "legacy" system interface, the extendable system design using design patterns, and a component-based multi-modal user interface with Java Beans technology.