BACnet Gets Down to Business at ASHRAE Conference

ATLANTA – From a new standard to activities taking place internationally, BACnet continues to seek improvement in tying together building equipment and systems manufactured by different companies.

ASHRAE recently published the newest version of Standard 135-2008, BACnet® -- A Data Communication Protocol for Building Automation and Control Networks. This new publication includes seven addenda that add BACnet/Web services and new objects for Event Log, Trend Log Multiple, Load Control, and Access Door.

Moving forward, the committee has 11 addenda in process for the 2008 version. In addition, addendum q for ASHRAE 135-2008 has been approved for publication and is available in the standards section of ASHRAE.org. Made in cooperation with members of the ZigBee Alliance, the new datalink specification allows mains-powered BACnet devices to communicate over the ZigBee wireless mesh network, opening up new installation options and furthering BACnet’s reach into all areas of facility monitoring and control, according to Dave Robin, BACnet chair.

At ASHRAE’s recent 2009 Winter Conference, the BACnet committee heard an update on BACnet activities from Russia. The BACnet Interest Group, Russia (BIG-RU) was recently asked by the Moscow State Construction University to prepare a BACnet training course at the university, which will become a required part of the curriculum.

“We estimate that at least 100 students will go through the course every year, and we expect that at least 50 of those will go into the industry experienced with BACnet", said Andrey Golovin, leader of the BIG-RU.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] The committee also heard about activities in Japan. “A proposed green project of the graduate school/faculty of the University of Tokyo will establish an intelligent facility management system with advanced ICT technologies , and is planning an integrated BACS to research how to reduce energy consumption to 30 percent by 2012 and 50 percent by 2030 at the University of Tokyo," reported Takeji Toyoda, the liaison to the BACnet committee from the Institute of Electrical Installation Engineers , Japan (IEIEJ).
Robin said the committee is expecting a busy spring public review period, with 11 addenda proposed for standard 135 and four for standard 135.1.

After an extended period to allow for some actual implementations to be prototyped, the BACnet Network Security architecture will go out for its fourth public review as addendum g, bringing state-of-the-art digital signatures and encryption to BACnet, enabling security-critical applications to use a standard protocol.

Developed in collaboration with the IEIEJ, the Global Group Object will go out for its second public review in addendum p. This extends the concept of the Group Object to monitor and report on changes in data collected from multiple external devices.
An enhanced Lighting Output Object will begin its third public review in addendum i, and a few additions made to the XML Data Formats will cause it to go out for its second public review in addendum t.

A new set of "Value Objects", proposed in addendum w, complete the data representation capabilities of BACnet. New objects like String Value Object and Unsigned Value Object enable more opportunities to present data in a standard, rather than proprietary, manner, according to Robin. In addition, the new Time Value Object enables the definition of an extension to BACnet scheduling for non-absolute times, allowing schedules to reference calculated times like sunrise/sunset.

ASHRAE, founded in 1894, is an international organization of some 50,000 persons. ASHRAE fulfills its mission of advancing heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration to serve humanity and promote a sustainable world through research, standards writing, publishing and continuing education. For more information visit www.ashrae.org

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