Messaging and Topics¶
Introduction¶
Agents in VOLTTRON™ communicate with each other using a publish/subscribe mechanism built on the Zero MQ or RabbitMQ Python libraries. This allows for great flexibility as topics can be created dynamically and the messages sent can be any format as long as the sender and receiver understand it. An agent with data to share publishes to a topic, then any agents interested in that data subscribe to that topic.
While this flexibility is powerful, it also could also lead to confusion if some standard is not followed. The current conventions for communicating in the VOLTTRON are:
Topics and subtopics follow the format:
topic/subtopic/subtopic
Subscribers can subscribe to any and all levels. Subscriptions to topic will include messages for the base topic and all subtopics. Subscriptions to
topic/subtopic1
will only receive messages for that subtopic and any children subtopics. Subscriptions to empty string (“”) will receive ALL messages. This is not recommended.
Agents should set the From header. This will allow agents to filter on the To message sent back.
Topics¶
In VOLTTRON¶
alerts - Base topic for alerts published by agents and subsystems, such as agent health alerts
analysis - Base topic for analytics being used with building data
config - Base topic for managing agent configuration
devices - Base topic for data being published by drivers
datalogger - Base topic for agents wishing to record time series data
heartbeat - Topic for publishing periodic “heartbeat” or “keep-alive”
market - Base topics for market agent communication
record - Base topic for agents to record data in an arbitrary format
weather - Base topic for polling publishes of weather service agents
Note
Other more specific topics may exist for specific agents or purposes. Please review the documentation for the specific feature for more information.
Controller Agent Topics¶
See the documentation for the Actuator Agent.