It began with the thermostat—the first electric building control device. "People used to bang on the pipe to alert the superintendent to send up more heat," says Kenneth Wacks, a building automation management and engineering consultant based in Stoneham, Mass. "That led to the development of the thermostat, a signaling device from the tenant space to the basement where the boilers were."
Today, control and communications technologies are converging to create the "intelligent building." Although a precise definition remains elusive, most experts agree that an intelligent building uses an array of technologies to supply, monitor, automate, and integrate environmental, security, and communications services.
"Intelligent buildings are buildings that respond to conditions without human intervention," says Vladimir Bazjanac, a staff scientist in the Building Technologies Department of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.
The march toward the intelligent building has been long and difficult. As long ago as the 1930s, pulp science magazines were predicting the imminent arrival of buildings that would cater to their occupants' needs with automated environmental, communication, and even entertainment services. Yet relatively few of us now believe we live and work in buildings that can truly be called "intelligent."
So what happened? Terry Hoffman, director of building automation systems marketing for Milwaukee-based Johnson Controls, notes that early predictions were sidetracked by a combination of overly optimistic engineering projections, battling proprietary technologies, and a general reluctance by people to spend large sums of money on a technology that many view as frivolous.
"The forecasters kind of got ahead of the curve and failed to fully consider all of the technical and financial requirements of building automation," he says.
But time and technology are finally catching up with years of deferred promises. Vendors are slowly putting away their proprietary attitudes in favor of alliances. Real-world standards are gradually emerging. And perhaps most importantly, people are becoming more comfortable using cutting-edge systems in all facets of their daily lives. "We're moving forward," says Hoffman.
Building The Foundation
All inhabitable structures reside on strong physical foundations, but intelligent buildings also require a resilient technological underpinning. Until several years ago, this infrastructure was provided by companies such as Johnson Controls and Honeywell that developed and marketed various proprietary automation architectures.
"That doesn't mean they didn't recognize the value of standards, but they tended to shy away from standards that made all their products interchangeable with their competitors' products, such Wacks.
The industry began moving toward an open environment in the mid 1990s, when a consortium of building management companies, system users, and manufacturers joined together and finalized the Building Automation and Control Networks (BACnet) protocol. Today, BACnet is recognized as the oldest and most widely used open protocol communication standard for commercial intelligent building applications.
"BACnet is both a U.S. ANSI and international ISO standard," says Wacks.
BACnet supports virtually all types of building systems, including heating-ventilating-air conditioning (HVAC), security, access control, fire, vertical transport, maintenance, waste management, and lighting. It works with any device featuring one or more compatible functions, such as analog and binary inputs and outputs, schedules, control loops, and alarms. As an open protocol, it doesn't demand any proprietary chip sets or other components.
The technology's approach differs from its prime rival, LonWorks. This widely used automation communications protocol, developed by San Jose-based Echelon Corp., demands a proprietary Neuron chip inside the controllers that connect individual devices into the network. Despite this requirement, numerous building device vendors have adopted LonWorks as the foundation for their product and service offerings.
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