EMAIL INTERVIEW – Apurba Pradhan, Business Unit Director, Industrial Edge Computing, Dialog, a Renesas Company

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Sinclair; I see that IAP is now an ANSI/CTA standard. Can you tell me about IAP and what problem it solves?

Apurba Pradhan IAP stands for the IoT Access Protocol, and it’s recently been approved by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) as ANSI/CTA 709.10. It is the first open and extensible web services protocol for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks.

Today we see a lot of integrators struggling to connect new technologies like LoRaWAN sensor devices to legacy building management systems. There is often a mismatch between new IoT technologies and legacy technologies like BACnet and LON. But this connection is necessary if we’re going to make truly smart buildings.

Sinclair; How do integrators handle this today?

Apurba Pradhan Today people generally either do manual data-point mapping or use SCHC protocols. Both of these processes are labor intensive, not generally repeatable/extendable and the results are less than ideal. They also only support BACnet, so if some of your building infrastructure uses something like LON, or Modbus, or DALI, these approaches won’t cover that.

The point of IAP is to get all of a building’s many disparate devices – made by different companies, installed at different times and communicating by various protocols –to understand each other’s data and share it with any application like a BMS or SCADA workstation, or data analytics and AI platforms. Dialog contributed IAP for standardization because we believe this is how we can start to build truly smart systems that can automate processes and predict outcomes. With this standard, we as an industry can start breaking down the silos of automation that typically exist in industrial control networks.

Sinclair; What exactly does IAP do?

Apurba Pradhan IAP defines a common information model and services that run across commercial IoT, industrial IoT, IT, and web infrastructure. You can think of it as creating a data and services fabric that connects the devices and datapoints across your smart building infrastructure. It supports the installation, monitoring, and management of devices, and enables them to be integrated with each other and with external services. The unified information model enables 3^rd party applications (such as AI or analytics) to understand and interpret the meaning of and relationship between data types.

In the building automation area, IAP can normalize data from sensors such as LoRaWAN devices into a system with BACnet, LON, Modbus, and other building automation protocols. It basically creates a digital twin of your devices, so each device is accessed by the building automation system via the protocol of choice, translating LoRa into a language the BMS can understand. IAP provides LoRaWAN-to-BMS integrations in a low-code environment, with a simple user interface and drag-and-drop tools.

IAP is also highly scalable. If you install it in one of your facilities, you can reuse your design by copying the configurations across any of your facilities.

Sinclair; How does IAP work from a technical standpoint?

Apurba Pradhan IAP is specified as a standard web services application protocol based on MQTT and REST over HTTP or HTTPS transport protocols. MQTT and REST are widely used today for the IoT, but they are low-level protocols with no standardization in the application data and service requests sent using the protocols. IAP delivers that standardization for control and automation networks.

The new standard includes hundreds of device profiles that standardize behavior for a wide range of industrial and commerci

al applications. Industry working groups together developed the broad library of profiles, ensuring support for applications such as HVAC, indoor and outdoor lighting, security, access control, energy and gas metering, energy management, fire and smoke control, commercial and industrial I/O, gas detection, generators, room automation, renewable energy – and the list goes on.

Sinclair; How can I get started with IAP?

Apurba Pradhan IAP works on edge servers like Dialog’s SmartServer IoT and others.

The new ANSI/CTA 709.10 standard is available as a free download from the CTA.

Apurba Pradhan leads the Industrial Edge Computing division of Dialog, a Renesas Company, where he is responsible for product development, operations, sales and marketing of system solutions for Smart Buildings and Factories.  He has over 10 years of experience in product management and marketing of IoT systems and software.  He holds an MBA from UC Berkeley, an MS in optical engineering from the University of Rochester and a BA in physics and mathematics from Clark University.

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