Domotia Economica Para Casas

Communication Systems for Building
Automation and Control
WOLFGANG KASTNER, GEORG NEUGSCHWANDTNER, STEFAN SOUCEK, AND
H. MICHAEL NEWMAN
Invited Paper
Building automation systems (BAS) provide automatic control of
the conditions of indoor environments. The historical root and still
core domain of BAS is the automation of heating, ventilation and
air-conditioning systems in large functionalbuildings. Their primary
goal is to realize significant savings in energy and reduce
cost. Yet the reach of BAS has extended to include information from
all kinds of building systems, working toward the goal of “intelligent
buildings.” Since these systems are diverse by tradition, integration
issues are of particular importance. When compared with
the field of industrial automation,building automation exhibits specific,
differing characteristics. The present paper introduces the task
of building automation and the systems and communications infrastructure
necessary to address it. Basic requirements are covered
as well as standard application models and typical services. An
overview of relevant standards is given, including BACnet, Lon-
Works and EIB/KNX as open systems of keysignificance in the
building automation domain.
Keywords—Automation, building management systems, distributed
control, field buses, networks, standards.
I. INTRODUCTION
Home and building automation systems are—in the
broadest sense—concerned with improving interaction with
and between devices typically found in an indoor habitat.
As such, they provide a topic with many facets and rangefrom small networks with only a handful of devices to
very large installations with thousands of devices. This
paper, however, narrows its focus on the automation of large
functional buildings, which in the following will be referred
to as “buildings” for simplicity. Examples include office
buildings, hospitals, warehouses, or department stores as
Manuscript received January 19, 2005; revisedMarch 17, 2005.
W. Kastner and G. Neugschwandtner are with the Automation Systems
Group, Institute of Automation, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna
1040, Austria (e-mail: k@auto.tuwien.ac.at; gn@auto.tuwien.ac.at).
S. Soucek is with LOYTEC Electronics GmbH, Vienna 1080, Austria
(e-mail: soucek@ieee.org).
H. M. Newman is with the Utilities Computer Section, Cornell University,
Ithaca,NY 14850 USA (e-mail: hmn2@cornell.edu).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JPROC.2005.849726
well as large distributed complexes of smaller installations
such as retail chains or gas stations. These types of buildings
are especially interesting since their size, scale, and
complexity hold considerable potential for optimization, but
also challenges.
The key driver of the buildingautomation market is the
promise of increased user comfort at reduced operation cost.
To this end, building automation systems (BAS) make use
of optimized control schemes for heating, ventilation, and
air-conditioning (HVAC) systems, lighting, and shading. Improvements
in energy efficiency will also contribute to environmental
protection. For this reason, related regulations
sometimes mandate theuse of BAS.
Costs can further be reduced by providing access to all
building service systems in a centralized monitoring and control
center. This allows abnormal or faulty conditions to be
detected, localized and corrected at an early stage and with
minimum personnel effort. This is especially true when access
to the site is offered through a remote connection. A
unified visualization schemefor all systems further eases the
task of the operator. Direct access to BAS data from the corporate
management level eases data acquisition for facility
management tasks such as cost allocation and accounting.
Besides the immediate savings, indirect benefits may be
expected due to higher expected workforce productivity or
by the increased perceived value of the automated building
(the...