Blueprint to Breaching the Commercial Automation Market

Learn about the challenges and opportunities with building automation and its integration with security and life-safety systems.

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An example of a company that has found a home in the building automation market is ESI Malta, a firm based in St. Venera, Malta, a southern European island country in the Mediterranean Sea.

The company occasionally subcontracts for U.S.-based integrators that are in need of specialized automation skill sets and expertise.

“We strongly believe in the power of systems integration so we integrate as many subsystems as possible,” says Trevor Buhagiar, a business development manager with ESI Malta. “This is our philosophy that all systems in a building must be integrated to get the data and knowledge. When you have it coming from all ends of your building, and having it all integrated and controlled by one single platform, then you have control of your building and you really can manage it.”

ESI is a systems integration firm in the true sense of the word as they install and administer industrial processing systems, building management and security integration from start to finish. Fifty percent of its business is in building automation and management, 30% in industrial process control in factories, and 20% integrated security.

“We have 36 people here who are focused to do integration,” says Buhagiar. “Whatever the situation may be, we integrate it. We write proprietary drivers when needed and we develop [tailored] graphical user interfaces that end users use on a daily basis.”

The Basics of Energy Management

Energy consumption is truly the place where the rubber meets the road in a BAS. Control of how energy is put to use is integral to creating a cost-effective solution that addresses conservation, not to mention another source of revenue.

In today’s world that usually means the use of network technology and a host of specialized devices designed to “talk” to one another, even those that function using dissimilar operating platforms.

It’s the systems integrator’s job to bring all this together. Integrated security systems are the eyes, ears and the hands of a quality, well-designed BAS. Without motion detection, door sensors, fire and smoke sensors, and the network infrastructure to go with it, a BAS is virtually blind other than the ability to schedule events.

When we view building automation and security in this manner — when we stop and consider the need for sensors — it should be obvious the two disciplines go together nicely. The alternative, one that was prevalent many years ago, is for the building owners to pay two different companies to install duplicate devices. Not only does this cost more, but there’s more to maintain and more to go wrong.

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The answer, of course, is to merge security and energy management into the same control space without disturbing the primary functions of either one. Above all, the distributed approach assures that if the central BAS control system experiences a problem, each individual subsystem will continue to do the job to which it was designed and in the manner that it was specified, engineered and commissioned.

This is especially true where it comes to integrating fire protection and detection with a BAS. Integrators must assure that code compliancy is met from the sensors and notification appliances installed to the user interfaces and the third-party central/supervising station the security integrator uses.

“An example application for integrated security and BAS is where we identify the critical signals that indicate a possible threat for the building occupants — those that are business critical,” says Buhagiar. “We bring them from the BAS into our [Honeywell] Pro-Watch Security suite so these signals come up on the same GUI that shows security, a station that many times is manned 24/7.”

When the BAS receives a fire signal from the fire alarm panel, the system sends information about the fire alarm event to the event monitor of the security guard station. This event also brings up the graphical maps on the GUI, which prompts the security guard to pinpoint the origin of the alarm signal, Buhagiar explains.

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