Are you ready for the coming wave in smart buildings?

Buildings with standalone, proprietary building automation systems (BAS) will soon be a thing of the past. Facilities and security departments need to prepare for the coming wave. Are you ready? “We’re on the cusp,” says Paul Ehrlich, president of St. Paul, MN-based engineering consultancy Building Intelligence Inc. “The dream of having every light switch and element built on an IT network is probably still 10 years out, but parts of it are already there.” IT, facilities and security departments need to prepare for the coming wave as building systems merge with IT into one unified machine running on monster networks. Technology that allows buildings to operate as self-aware organisms will add heating, lighting, ventilation and about a dozen other BAS sub-systems to IT backbones that already control data, voice, video and security systems. Ehrlich says organizations with mission-critical infrastructure such as hospitals, laboratories, and data centres are years ahead. By necessity, these have already mastered the art of fully integrating their BAS and IT systems to control high-risk environments. Most new commercial and residential buildings are being designed with some degree of interoperability. “Newer BAS product lines are moving to IP, and some are even native IP, which allows them to act like a PC, phone or other pure IP device,” says Rick Huijbregts, vice-president of vertical markets at Cisco Systems (Canada). But these new developments are a small percentage of the total stock of buildings in North America. The real prize lies in retrofitting intelligence into the much larger number of existing buildings built within the past decade or so with proprietary, standalone BAS systems. These waste energy, as lighting, heating and other systems often work against each other, and building owners struggling with rising energy costs are looking for solutions to wrestle them down. Until recently, developers who wanted to make these systems interoperable were constrained to either rip and replace old BAS systems with expensive new models or face an integration nightmare. However, powerful new IT players are now entering this potentially lucrative market to step up development for new buildings and tackle retrofit issues. “In the last six months, three major IT companies – Cisco, IBM and Accenture – have come out with either practices or solutions for intelligent buildings. And others like Hewlett-Packard (HP) are going there,” says Ehrlich. “This will be a big change from traditional providers like Johnson Controls, Honeywell and Siemens.” How it works Cisco in particular is making a big push into this area. In January 2009, Cisco acquired Richards-Zeta Building Intelligence Inc and the company’s Mediator middleware, which translates proprietary BAS protocols into IP. “It’s a black box you put on the IT network that allows you to plug in different BAS systems built in the past and allows them to talk to each other with web services and IP,” says Huijbregts. There are cost savings to be had beyond the reductions in energy consumption that are typically touted for intelligent buildings, he says. Consolidation of a dozen infrastructure systems that control heating, lighting, elevators can reduce capital costs. “The savings in actual cabling infrastructure are about 14% to 20%.” And there are more potential savings if redundant systems are converged, he adds. “For example, you could use IP video surveillance cameras to record classes in educational settings instead of having two systems.” The savings in recurring operational expenses are even more significant, he says. “Opex savings are between 8% to 15% annually.” Maintenance can be handled more efficiently, as intelligent buildings have fault detection capabilities that can alert staff when systems are close to failure. “The building can dynamically tell us when it needs to be serviced so you can set rules in advance. Instead of waiting for a light bulb to die before facilities staff attend to it, once it’s on the network you’ll know when it’s been on 1500 hours and can schedule replacements for all the bulbs in that category.” Network capacity doesn’t need to be expanded significantly to support these efficiencies, as the extra bandwidth needed for converged BAS systems is relatively small, he says. “Compared to voice and video, the stream coming from controllers is small, assuming the network is already built with typical levels of security and resiliency. Some companies may already have all the network infrastructure needed in place, but others may need to upgrade.” Nor is much extra hardware or network reconfiguration needed. “Each technical closet on every floor will need a Mediator black box, which is about the size of a box of cereal, and extra ports to plug in the BAS systems so they can talk to the controllers. On average, we need to install about 20 per cent more ports to support integration.” The impact on data centres is also minimal, depending on the degree of intelligence desired. “If you want intelligent lighting, you may need a dedicated server, but with virtualized servers and new data centre concepts, an organization may need little additional hardware.” One dashboard PC with access to all systems can replace a dozen monitoring stations dedicated to each BAS sub-system. With a secure network, access for sub-contractors can be restricted to the elements they manage. “They won’t even need to come in physically to monitor systems – they can do it from their offices or homes.” A common fear is creating a single point of failure if building systems are integrated, but this is unwarranted. “You’re just adding middleware,” he says. “If a sub-system fails, it will revert to operating standalone. But you won’t have visibility to it through the dashboard workstation, and you lose the intelligence.” He points out Cisco has hands-on experience in consolidating and integrating systems across geographic regions. “Cisco has three facilities and security operating centres in California, London and Sydney controlling access, video surveillance and data centres for 400 properties globally. All are connected, so if one is down, the other two take over.” Stumbling blocks But experts involved on the engineering and construction side have some reservations about creating interoperability in retrofits with middleware. “Cisco’s Mediator is a good product, and there’s other good middleware available too,” says Ehrlich. “These can do some of the gateway functions, but many old BAS protocols are poorly documented and aren’t supported. Often they can be upgraded to open standards, but often as not, they need to be ripped out.” There are many people and process issues that go beyond technology in these types of integration projects, says Stephen Foster, director of ICT at Mississauga-based contractor EllisDon Corp. “Cisco’s Mediator helps solve some of the problems, but we’re not there yet. Our construction partners are used to the vision of doing business with sub-contractors for a dozen BAS sub-systems.” Ted Maulucci, CIO of Toronto-based condo developer Tridel Corp, agrees that making the business case to partners is difficult. “There aren’t many proven case studies yet,” he says. And there are many network design considerations beyond middleware that need to be thought through thoroughly, says Ehrlich. “The systems that BAS go on have to be done right with the proper security, as you have integration and security of both the network and the BAS systems to consider. We’ve seen owners who’ve put systems in place where people have hacked into them or taken some BAS servers and used them to host porn.” While BAS systems may revert to standalone basis if the network fails, the impact of downtime on security systems has to be considered too, he adds. “For example, we don’t place fire alarm systems on IT networks. These have zero tolerance for downtime – you can’t chance it even with 99.999 network performance. When we integrate those systems, they get dedicated cabling and we connect them at the highest level, so there’s no impact on fire alarm systems if the network fails.” Disaster recovery planning (DRP) needs to be rethought if building operations centres are merged with data centres, as is often the case, he says. “DRP for data centres and for facilities are different. More things can happen to buildings, from leaky roofs to fires, floods and terrorist attacks. There are more risks to consider than you might see for an isolated data centre, and recovery is also different.” But these are all teething pains of a growing movement, and many of the skills and knowledge needed to integrate BAS and IT already exist to a certain degree in many organizations. “What’s being done in an organization’s data centres to integrate the two is often used as a model for the rest of its buildings, especially if there’s a seat at the table for data centre staff,” says Ira Goldschmidt, integration engineer at Building Intelligence Inc. “Facilities staff at organizations with technically advanced data centres are leading the way for the rest of the facilities group.” Some sectors such as retail have also mastered the art of integration and centralization of BAS and IT for commercial space on a huge scale, says Ehrlich. “Wal-Mart, Target and other big chains are running millions of square feet of real estate with small groups of staff, as they’ve always had business models where all their operations are centralized. They’re doing today what office building owners will be doing in a decade.” Rosie Lombardi is a freelance writer in Toronto. You can reach her via rosielombardi@hotmail.com

Are you ready for the coming wave in smart buildings?

News | June 17, 2009

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