What systems do smart buildings integrate?
The main candidates are the communications, security, monitoring, access, lighting, elevators and HVAC systems. Energy metering, and fire and other emergency services are also integrated to a high degree, but due to legal and security reasons, their functionality tends to be less dependent on data communication.
Why are these systems integrated?
Integration is both a technical objective and an opportunity in itself. As we will see shortly, large-scale integration has its benefits in terms of cost, both upfront and in the long run. But integration is what enables these separate systems to collaborate and form a larger, more intelligent system, capable of making useful decisions. This is what grants smart buildings an increased operational efficiency, lower costs, and greater flexibility for your business.
Integration and Business Requirements
So far, this looks rather intimidating. Some of those systems are complex enough on their own that they almost belong to separate branches of engineering. Where does one even begin to think of integrating them?
Requirements drive integration decisions. The modern IoT industry may not give that impression, but integrated access control systems and lighting systems, for example, did not arise because two young geeks woke up one day and thought, “Well, I wonder what happens if we put these two together”.
What happened, in fact, was that facility managers wanted an automated solution to the problem of lights being left on after business hours, or in infrequently-accessed areas such as basements.
This is a trivial example, but it illustrates a wider point: integration decisions should be driven by legitimate business requirements. Typical examples of such requirements include:
- Operational requirements, such as granting and logging access to parking spaces based on a vehicle’s number plate (ANPR camera system).
- Commissioning and exploitation requirements, such as allowing only certain persons to tweak a system’s parameters.
- Service, maintenance and infrastructure development requirements, such as quickly figuring out if a component is functioning or not, or obtaining data about its use.
- Decommissioning and environmental impact requirements
The exercise of narrowing down these requirements is useful regardless of which side of the facility divide you are. If you are a tenant, knowing what to integrate will help you prioritise deployment and installation activities. If you are a facilities owner or manager, knowing your customers’ requirements will help you prioritise infrastructure development and plan servicing and maintenance.
Infrastructure-level integration
Large-scale infrastructure integration is the foundation of application-level integration. However, it has both short-term and long-term advantages of its own, which are worth discussing separately.
Wired networks are the main mechanism of large-scale infrastructure integration. Smart devices use a variety of communication protocols, both wired and wireless, but the vast majority of inter-system traffic is carried out through the wired data network of a building.
Consequently, most of the infrastructure-level integration is carried out in terms of cabling, which is the fabric of a network’s infrastructure.
Media type consolidation is the most common and accessible opportunity that infrastructure integration affords. Today, most sections of a typical company network need only two or three types of cabling: copper Cat6 or Cat6a cabling for office networks and short-range data network integration, and fibre optic cabling – such as OS1, OS2, OM2 or OM3, for high-bandwidth and/or long-range (over 100 meters) applications, such as security cameras. Many company networks can be built almost exclusively over Cat6/Cat6e cabling, with high-speed fibre links reserved for data centres and core network sections.
Other cable types that used to be common until not so long ago include coaxial cables (mainly for CCTV systems) and Cat3 cables (primarily for voice communication equipment). However, the industry is shifting away from these, not so much for performance reasons (coaxial cable, for example, is still sufficient for basic CCTV use) but for practical reasons.
Fewer cable types mean less effort in terms of logistics and maintenance, and fewer media conversion equipment.
Structured data cabling solutions are the other widespread aspect of infrastructure-level integration. Structured cabling is a cabling design methodology that uses a uniform set of elementary building blocks for each section of a network. The design of every section – from the work area to the equipment room – is made according to an industry-accepted set of guidelines, which leads to a uniform and flexible cabling infrastructure.
