Supervisory control as pattern for integrated IT management

Saving energy in large data centers has become a focus of research and development. For its realization, IT and facility control systems must be connected and coordinate their activities. Building such an integrated management system that operates automatically and reliably is a challenging task. The paper describes such a system that has been built in the HP Labs Palo Alto research data center. We discuss a particular aspect of such a system: how the integration logic of the various management and control systems can be designed more systematically, referring to a theoretic framework of supervisory control that had been developed for industrial automation in the late 1990´s. We adopt the framework for constructing a set of coordinated controllers that are performing a set of desired management tasks.