Building automation interoperability – A review

The development of building automation systems (BAS) is strategic to answer comfort, security and energy saving requirements. In large buildings energy can represent a significant percentage of the energy year’s bill. An integrated BAS is expected to contribute for a significant decreased of costs, development, assembling and management cost, and it might contribute to a reduction of CO2. The goal is to develop an integration strategy aiming to establish an integrated control of the building sub-systems (e.g. heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC), lightning, security, etc.). To accomplish this integrated control there is a need to establish a communication strategy among the involved sub-systems. One of the challenges to develop such a BAS is on how to establish interoperability between sub-systems since they are from multi-manufactures and developed on heterogeneous technologies. A solution is to build a system that implements one of the emergent open protocols such as BACnet, LonWorks or KNX. They are open, interoperable, multi-vendor and provide an end-to-end solution. The paper presents a comparison between the characteristics of the mentioned protocols and the best one to implement an open building automation system is chosen. KeywordsBuilding Automation System (BAS); Interoperability; Open communication protocols; BACnet; LonWorks; KNX;