White Paper

White paper
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Integ rated Lighting Controls
|
04 March 2014
3
A white paper issued by: Siemens.
© Siemens AG 2014. All rights res erved
Building Blocks
The first step to building a successfully integrated system is
to reme mber that while lightin g controls are powerful in
their own right, they are a system within a whole building
infrastructu re. So, to integrate them successfully, the starting
point is th e BAS, which will be the foundation for the inte-
grated system.
There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that BAS
systems can already manage a wide array of systems — eve-
rything fro m HVAC to security — so operators and engineers
are familiar with using a central point to gather data from a
wide range of building operations. This is another point in
favor of integration; being able to manage and monitor light-
ing thro ugh the same dashboard as other building system s
streamlines building operations and management.
“When I’ve chatted with building system s folks, building en -
gineers who have th e screens up in their offices, basically
what I hear is they want it all on one screen,” says Jonathan
Plumpton, vice president, lighting design group, WSP Flack +
Kurtz. “They don’t want to have to switch between two or
three different programs to get it all, even though
they’ve
ess
entially bought separate system s. They want to have the
simplicity to pull it up all on one screen .”
The second reason to make the BAS the founda tion for inte-
gration is that if there is a roadblock in the integration pro-
cess, then it’s generally easier and cheaper — although not
necessarily easy or cheap — to replace or modify lighting
controls than it is a BAS. Or, if absolutely necessary, certain
functionality can be dialed back so that the ligh ting controls
are partially integrated , such as using the BAS to manage
schedules and on/off comm ands based on occupancy, but
keeping the daylight harvesting controls separate.
While it may seem like the solution to building a bridge be-
tween the lighting controls and the BAS is sim ply to use an
open protocol such as BACnet, it’s a little trickier than that,
says Jack Althoff, owner representative, ProJeX, Inc. First,
both systems have to speak not only the sa me language, but
the sam e dialect. For example, when lo oking to use BACnet
to integ rate controls, are you going to use BACnet/IP or BAC-
net MS/TP? Will you use the ligh ting controls schedule, or th e
BACnet schedule? Do th
e lightin g controls you want to use
support BACnet’s alarming object, or do you need another
solution for alarm management?
Integrated Controls Help Keep The Bow Efficient
In many lighting controls integration projects, the ultimate goal is to simply make it easier for
th e systems to function. That's the case at The Bow, the Calgary high-rise that is home to the
headqu a rters of EnCana Corp orati on.
The building, which has 55 occupiable fl o ors and more than 1.9 million sq u are feet of usable
space, also has severa l thousand addres s points on its building management and lighting con-
trols ne twork s. This leads to a numbe r of challenges, including si m p ly managing network traf-
fic.
To help streaml i ne the amount of traffic and ensure more efficient operation, the controls fo r
th e blinds were integrated into the buildin g management system (BMS). By doing so , the blinds
could respond to the information from the weather stati o ns and other senso r s that was already
coming into the BMS, as opposed to that information havi ng to travel from the BMS to the lig ht-
ing controls, then being used to manage the bli n ds.
"It was easi er fo r us to tak e all th e information and just control their blinds tha n for them to
take all the inform ation from the building — all the sensors on the roof, in
th e atriums, ev
ery-
th ing — and pull it into the sy stem and control thei r blin ds," says Cameron McF adden, account
engineer , Sie mens.
With integration becom ing a more common request, tha t means more po i n ts and more ad-
dre sses bein g managed by one system, which Mc F ad den says leads to another thing to keep in
mind. Nam in g conventions can vary pretty widely betwee n vendors, so a longer name in one
syste m could get trunca te d in another, leading to confusion about what a particular name is
identifying. To avoid this, settl e on a convention that will work on all systems before beginn ing
th e work of addressing components.