Modern Building Services

SMART BUILDINGS W ith buildings accounting for an estimated 40% of global energy use* better energy efficiency and reduced maintenance costs have been major drivers behind the design of smart buildings. The Internet of Things (IoT) and the associated digital ecosystems are paving the way for a new world of interconnected intelligent buildings that are optimizing energy efficiency and occupant comfort. With building systems becoming increasingly complex, solving the conundrum of seamless communication between disparate systems continues to be an important challenge. There are numerous standards in use today; BACnet for HVAC, DALI and KNX for lighting, Modbus for electrical metering and power management, M-Bus for heat metering. IoT data has added additional complexity to proceedings with vendors handling data in various ways. The use of standard protocols helps with integration but is not enough to solve the problem of systems easily sharing and exchanging data. Lack of a common single standard for data management, to enable data to be properly understood by any supervisory or analytics software, adds significant engineering costs and time when integrating applications and systems. Project Haystack, the open-source initiative led by some of the world’s leading engineering companies, is a solution gaining traction to standardize how metadata is defined for smart buildings, smart equipment and the IoT. About Project Haystack Project Haystack was formed in 2014. The not-for-profit corporation functions as a trade association with the purpose of fostering the common association and interests of software and technology companies focused on developing semantic modelling solutions for data related to smart devices. The Project’s aims to promote and educate those involved in buildings and their management about the value of semantic tagging and data- modelling, especially with regard to building automation systems, and to engage in educational activities directed towards the improvement of business conditions of the semantic data modelling industry for smart device data, all on a not- for-profit basis. Haystack has been set up to provide context to data which is being communicated between systems - commonly known as semantic tagging. By tagging the data within a system it becomes possible to fully automate the generation of plant schematics, floorplans, dashboards, alarms and energy reports, as well as deliver real-time fault and performance analytics. Haystack is not a replacement for any of the aforementioned standard protocols used for lower- level automation but acts as a complement, working at system and enterprise-level abstraction, integrating with non-automation data (e.g. from IT systems) and connecting operational technology and IT through a richer more IT- friendly data set and APIs. The adoption of open frameworks that support tagging simplifies systems integration. FEATURE SMART BUILDINGS Scott Muench , Vice President Marketing & Business Development J2 Innovations, a founding member of the project, says open frameworks will ‘glue’ systems together so we can make buildings more efficient, sustainable, and better for occupants Project Haystack 30 MODERN BUILDING SERVICES MARCH 2021