BACnet and Internet of Things for Systems Managers.

How are BAcnet, Internet of Things, and their requirements, features and users, related? Apologies to Toby Considine. Just cannot get over Internet of Things.

In building automation who does one try to serve? When one goes through the list - owners, operators, and occupiers - it usually comes to the facilities managers - and being a bit more general about what automation we might be talking about - systems managers. System managers are beset by fear. Fear of disruption from all sorts of directions. System managers crave stability and reliability foremost. Efficiency and optimization comes after that. Systems managers are faced with monumental tasks.

In the Internet of Things wave, almost every facet of how a systems platform goes together are up for consideration... security, manageabilty and interoperation are current hot topics. Alan Messer of Samsung showed a great list at a recent MIT IoT event.

Turns out BACnet, as a lingua franca for building automation, has many of the facets well under control.
Especially well covered: clear semantics, great model and defaults, topology definition, simplicity with extensibility, system setup strategies part of architecture (like discoverability).

And there are things BACnet can be served well by from watching and following IoT. Especially techniques in:

• Location awareness.
• Wireless communications.
• Energy harvesting.
• Social information input.
• Raw simplicity (dumb things, simple networks).

BACnet and IoT presentation at Cimetrics.