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Intelligent Buildings

WEB CENTRIC BUILDING

MANAGEMENT: “OPEN” WINS

THE RACE TO BIG DATA

GORD ECHLIN lectors to gather the data, and the ‘head end’ (Building
Marketing and Business Development Management Application/server) as a central (mostly
Triacta Power Solutions closed) data repository.

THERE HAS BEEN a dramatic shift in building management Access to these systems has been to date mostly on
systems over the past 10 years. The rapid development of premise and local—with limited communication capabili-
cloud-based applications and the evolution of networking ties between the ‘head end’ and the plethora of powerful,
technologies have set the stage for a radical change in how cloud-based energy management and building control
building services will be delivered and managed going for- applications that are starting to emerge. A growing
ward. Building control and metering capabilities that were pressure to get access to and share building manage-
once only achievable through large scale investments in ment information has resulted in some rudimentary
singular, proprietary systems are now accessible to all build- cloud-based integration for these systems, but even so,
ing owners using emerging, open technologies that take full information access is often slow, limited in scope, and
advantage of these evolving network capabilities. confined to proprietary formats and schemas.

ASHRAE, Project Haystack, and the Brick initiative have BORN FREE
just unveiled an alliance to create an industry standard
(ASHRAE Standard 223P) that sets the stage for unlock- This decade has heralded a new approach. The emer-
ing the power of a web-centric management gence of the BACnet communication protocol has
model for building owners and property man-
agers—and signals the next phase in a 40 year
path from expensive, closed building systems to
open, accessible building information networks.
By integrating Haystack tagging and Brick data
modeling concepts, the new standard will pro-
vide a dictionary of semantic tags for the label-
ling of building data, enabling interoperability
on semantic information across the building
industry, particularly in building automation and
control.

LOCKED AND BLOATED

A short while ago the only path for achieving
comprehensive building management was to
buy into a proprietary building automation sys-
tem from one vendor. This type of system is
comprised of simple actuators and sensors at
the lowest layer (often called instrumentation)
for measurement purposes, a middle tier of
Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) and col- Figure 1: Typical Building Automation System — with closed, on
premise access.

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