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The best BMS Solution must acquire several data of diverse Standard Technologies using “native” drivers for building automation, access control, hotel management,… Also other protocols should be integrated using OPC Servers. And it should be capable to serve this data to different clients (web visualization, pc visualization, energy management,…).
The problem
Solutions based on the KNX standard allows us to get good and very complete automation projects in many different facilities. However, on many occasions, due to the size and / or complexity of some projects, there are certain parts that may have been defined by project and implemented with other technologies and that we must integrate into a single solution as homogeneous as possible, in order, for example to visualize all the facilities from a single point.
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In our opinion, the best solution is to consider the well-known concept of the “Automation Pyramid”, based in the integration of all the technologies over an Ethernet network using IP interfaces and managing all the control variables using a BMS (Building Management Software). The automation pyramid, thus defines three levels: field, automation (Ethernet interface) and management.
In this case we will add to the KNX variables, already integrated by NETx BMS App for ETS some BACnet/IP, SNMP and some Modbus TCP datapoints, to form a complete system with HVAC control, Metering, LAN monitoring, lighting and blind Automation.
The KNX integration was very easy to do, as we could demonstrate in last articles. Even easier is BACnet integration. For the NETxAutomation BMS Server, the integration of BACnet variables is automatic, as it uses a self-discovery tool, as you can see in the pictures below:
After all the configurations, as a result we can see first all the available devices (IP gateways in the different technologies).
And also all the different datapoints from KNX, BACnet, Modbus and SNMP systems in a structured item tree, as we can see in the next picture.
Now, we can consider all this items as “brothers” so we can do several things with them, like e.g. virtual links between BACnet and KNX variables (see image 6), complex tasks using (LUA) scripts or just a visualization of several items from different technologies in the same screen.
Other advantage of the item tree that contains datapoints from different technologies is that we can do complex logic between them using X-LOGIC module as shown in the next image:
