UDMI Overview
The Universal Device Management Interface (UDMI) provides a high-level specification for the management and operation of physical IoT systems. It establishes a uniform, robust, and scalable interface layer between devices and applications.
UDMI Resources
The UDMI community provides essential resources to facilitate implementation and engagement:
- Core documentation for tools and specifications is available.
- The message schema definition is provided with an Interactive Viewer.
- An email discussion list is available at
udmi-discuss@googlegroups.com.
- A bi-weekly video meeting is open to all for discussion.
Major Capabilities
The UDMI platform provides five essential capabilities for enterprise IoT system stakeholders:
- Secure Ingestion: Provides core hosted services establishing secure connectivity and device authentication protocols for incoming data streams.
- Fleet Management: Maintains devices in a reliable and secure operational state across all building installations.
- Information Access: Delivers device telemetry to upstream consumers in a consistent and predictable manner. It relies on the curation of semantic modeling that dictates how applications access and interpret normalized data streams.
- Building Assembly: Defines the end-to-end flow for efficiently configuring and provisioning core infrastructure to accept and process data. This process integrates prerequisites, provisioning, and verification steps.
- Ecosystem Standardization: Provides uniform systems and tools necessary to drive consistency and minimize toil across a fleet of heterogeneous devices.
Design Philosophy
The UDMI approach to management automation is rooted in core architectural design principles, driving the platform toward the Software-Defined Building (SDB) model.
- Declarative Specification: Configuration defines the desired system state in cloud metadata, relying on an idempotent model to reliably match the actual reported state.
- Secure and Authenticated Foundation: The design mandates a rigorous security foundation, requiring a properly secured and authenticated channel from the device up to the managing infrastructure.
- Reduced Ambiguity: The design philosophy intentionally minimizes complexity by striving toward having a singular, explicit method for implementing core functions.
- Application Decoupling: The standardized interface completely separates device behavior and data structures from consuming applications, ensuring the portability of intelligence.
B-Suite Product Components
The UDMI tools are organized as the B-Suite product portfolio, a collection of separable components that collectively deliver the platform’s core capabilities:
- Barbican: The core hosted cloud-based system that runs continuous services for secure and robust fleet management operations.
- Bridgehead: The on-prem managed edge compute platform that packages components to translate field bus protocols and hosts the Spotter Node.
- BAMBI: The interface for model curation, system configuration, and provisioning, manifesting as a lightweight web-based interface.
- Biquencer: The dedicated system for automated standardized testing of IoT device compliance.
- Butler: The utility and control tools that provide reliable software rollout, configuration management, and orchestrate automated key rotation protocols across the managed fleet.
Key Roles and Associated CUJs
The UDMI platform serves distinct user personas, each with specific Critical User Journeys (CUJs):
- The Builder: In order to establish a functional operational system, this persona needs to physically and logically implement the architectural design.
- The Guardian: In order to ensure long-term platform health, this persona needs to operate and maintain the integrated technology solution after it transitions to live status.
- The Developer: In order to implement the management interface specification, this persona needs to program the device to adhere to specified requirements.
Feature Roadmap
The roadmap is prioritized using P0 (Must), P1 (Should), and P2 (Could) designators.
- Managed Updates (P0): Automates the deployment of security credentials (key and certificate rotation) and system software across the device fleet to maintain operational resilience and eliminate manual toil.
- Effortless Onboarding (P0): Integrates advanced interfaces and AI capabilities with the unified building model to streamline system configuration and provisioning for the Builder persona.
- Python Library (P0): Delivers a cleanly architected programming interface in a common scripting language to establish a common software environment for core infrastructure functions and reliable fleet-wide automation.
- Spotter Node (P1): Refactors the on-prem component to serve as a foundational platform for discovery scans, diagnostics, and network tracing, acting as the necessary “agent on the inside” for pre-onboarding validation.
- Headend Extraction (P1): Automates the retrieval of existing model data directly from proprietary Building Management System head-end APIs to ensure model consistency and comprehensiveness.
- Testing Cadre (P1): Creates a standardized testing environment and prescriptive procedure for external partner compliance verification, enabling manufacturers to perform self-testing locally.
- Open Infrastructure (P1): Implements a functionally equivalent open-source architectural replacement for proprietary core messaging components to secure long-term architectural independence and reduce operational overhead.
- Responsive Validator (P2): Enhances internal validation tools for continuous monitoring of telemetry data quality, tracking message rate and value tolerance across all production sites.
- Fieldbus Diagnosticator (P2): Creates an automated capability for extracting low-level fieldbus packet traces from managed systems to the cloud, providing a robust mechanism for triaging foundational system errors.
- Batch Provisioning (P2): Delivers a scalable provisioning capability that automates device setup using unique identifiers to generate secure keys and endpoints, enabling onboarding-at-scale.
- Writeback Core (P2): Standardizes the mechanism for deploying algorithmic control logic from the cloud across the installed fleet, providing the foundation for continuous feature evolution and SDB functionality.
- Vendor Catalog (P2): Delivers a structured output of compliance testing results to foster ecosystem understanding and support procurement decisions.