Just curious, why does the MasterDriver agent publish the same point with two different, but similar topic names? For example "devices/campus/building/bacnet1/OCC_COOL_SP" and "devices/OCC_COOL_SP/bacnet1/building/campus". Are both topics needed?
This feature was originally intended to make writing agents that did automatic discovery easier. If you wanted to find all the devices that had an OAT point (or whatever) you could subscribe to "devices/OAT" and get the value of the OAT point on every device.
In practice about the only publishes anyone uses are the depth first "all" publishes.
You can read about all the different publish types here: http://volttron.readthedocs.io/en/develop/core_services/drivers/Driver-Configuration.html#device-state-publishes
You can shut off the ones that you don't use by changing the settings described here: http://volttron.readthedocs.io/en/develop/core_services/drivers/Driver-Configuration.html#scalability-settings
Those settings go in the individual device configuration and are set per device.
In the future we may set the default value for publish_breadth_first_all, publish_depth_first, and publish_breadth_first to False.
Edit
I should also mention that all historians rely on the depth first all publish to do their work. If you shut that off all historians will stop collecting data.