Internet editorial

Citation

(1998), "Internet editorial", Facilities, Vol. 16 No. 12/13. https://doi.org/10.1108/f.1998.06916lag.001

Internet editorial

Building control standards

This Internet editorial uncovers some useful resources for building specifiers and operators wanting to find out more about standards in building automation. Facilities managers experienced first-hand, the growing pains of building automation in the 1970s and 1980s. Manufacturers provided a suite of different building automation systems serving different functions in a building. However, many of these were inaccessible to the normal user. They involved costly bespoke software solutions that tied the building owner to a lifelong marriage with the software developer. Furthermore, the intended flexibility was never realised because none of the building systems were capable of talking to one another. Today, facilities managers have to deal with the inheritance of these past mistakes. However, with the advent of new building automation standards, there can be few excuses for engaging in a specification process that repeats these mistakes. The following sites provide useful points of reference.

LonMark Interoperability Association (http://www.lonmark.org/)

The mission of the LonMark Association is "to enable the easy integration of multi-vendor systems based on LonWorks networks using standard tools and components". There are over 3,500 companies now using LonWorks control networks to provide systems and solutions for building, home, industrial, telecommunications, transportation and other industries. The Association provides an open forum for member companies to work together on marketing and technical programs to advance the LonMark standard for open interoperable control solutions. The Association has three major functions:

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  Definition of the design guidelines for interoperable devices based on LonWorks.

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  Certification of products that meet the LonMark standard for interoperability.

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  Promotion of LonMark products and systems as open interoperable control solutions.

The Website itself provides a full membership listing covering sponsors including Carrier, Honeywell, Motorola and Johnson Controls. It has an up-to-date listing of events and breaking news. The site also has some key documents pertaining to the LonMark standard covering devices for smoke detection, lighting, refrigeration and many others. These are available for download freely as Adobe™ Acrobat PDF files. Another useful resource on the site is a complete database listing of conforming products together with some detailed technical specifications. For anyone contemplating LonMarks as a standard, this is a voluminous and indispensable Web resource.

American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Heating Engineers (http://www.ashrae.org/)

The main source of reference for the BACnet standard is The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Heating Engineers Website. The BACnet standard is not consipicuous in the Website ­ I was only able to obtain articles on it by using the search tool. The difficulty is confounded by the presence of many standards for many application areas. The section on standards presents only a listing of titles which suggests that most of the material can only be obtained in hardcopy form or CD-ROM. The Website had a number of useful articles on the BACnet standard although the site itself provide little information on the subject. This contrasted markedly with the information provided on the LonMark site.

Conclusions

As ever, the World Wide Web continues to offer up information for the facilities management community, the size and timeliness of which is impressive indeed. However, sometimes I am reminded of a quote from an anonymous observer who declared "standards, I love standards because there are so many to choose from".