Reprints     Printer-Friendly    Email this Article    RSS        Font Size     What's This?

[Technology Report]

Fully Smart Buildings Still In The Blueprint Stage


Standards are the key to automation and convenience.

John Edwards  |   ED Online ID #12854  |   June 29, 2006

Article Rating:

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.




<-- prev. page     [1] 2 3     next page -->

Reprints     Printer-Friendly    Email this Article    RSS        Font Size     What's This?


  • A New Design Inflection Point
  • Forecasting Industry Growth For 2009 And Beyond
  • EDA Retools To Exploit Multicore Architectures
  • Design And Verification Move Up In Abstraction
  • EDA Retools To Exploit Multicore Architectures
  • A New Design Inflection Point
  • Design And Verification Move Up In Abstraction
  • Challenges Lurk For 22-nm Physical Implementation
    1) 1-A Switching Regulators Operate With 96% Efficiency To Replace Linear Regulators
    (500 views today)
    2) Build A Smart Battery Charger Using A Single-Transistor Circuit
    (307 views today)
    3) Battery Pack Improves Li-Ion Management For Electric Vehicles
    (302 views today)
    4) New Power Approaches May Fuel Analog Job Opportunities In Security And Health Applications
    (296 views today)
    5) Step-Down Switching Regulator Provides 60-V Input Transient Protection
    (147 views today)
    ALL TOP 20







    Reader Comments

    Do you really think that the cabling of all things is what makes smart homes expensive? This "expensive, commercial-level cabling" is about $65.00 per 1000 feet and guarantees the highest possible data throughput available since wireless speeds will never even approach wire speeds.

    Anonymous -July 06, 2006

    It is unfortunate that the graphic for Figure 1 is virtually illegible in terms of the additional information in the shaded boxes, each of which presents a different element of the advanced lighting control system. Daylight harvesting is only one of six energy management strategies that addressable systems can employ simultaneously to achieve commercial building lighting-related energy savings of up to 70% compared to conventional lighting control technologies.

    Mike Gerow -July 01, 2006   (Article Rating: )

    POST YOUR COMMENTS HERE

    Name:

    Email:
    Rate this article:

     less useful more useful 
    1
    2
    3
    4
    5
    Your Comments:

    Enter the text from the image below




    Please refresh the page if you have trouble reading this text.
     
     

    PartFinder

    Find real-time pricing, stock status, same-day/next-day shipping options and more. Brought to you by Digi-Key. Go to PartFinder.    
    GlobalSpec

    PART SEARCH :
    Powered by: GlobalSpec - The Engineering Search Engine
    Sponsored Links

    Electronic Design Europe Electronic Design China EEPN Power Electronics Auto Electronics Microwaves & RF
    Mobile Dev & Design Schematics Find Power Products Military Electronics EE Events Related Resources