Building Automation: Wishes For A New Year

摘要

With another new year upon us, we find ourselves reflecting on the past year's efforts and what might have made them easier or more successful. As usual, this focus centers on the use of open communications protocols in our industry. Fortunately, open protocols are clearly a success and are here to stay - the near universal support of BACnet~R (and LonTalk/LonMark~R to a lesser degree) by the BAS industry is a clear sign of this success. However, as with technology in general, each advance seems to reveal the need for more advances to achieve that elusive state of perfection. What are they? 1 Interoperability for operator interfaces. As BACnet continues to build on its domination of the so-called building controller level of the market, the need for interoperability at the next BAS component up the hierarchy continues to be missing. To date, there still is no BTL listing for operator interface functionality, due to the lack of sufficient protocol support for these products in the original standard.