Project overview

Telecom offices in Pune are located in Lohegaon. There is a managed tower complex with state of the art facilities and houses several other multi national companies. The Telecom offices are located on the 3rd and 4th Floors of wings A and B.

Initial Situation

The large expanse of the office complex and architecture of the building required installation of several hundred Variable Air volume controllers (VAVs) in order to provide the required air flow and environment control. The VAVs supported BACnet MSTP and hence it was possible to loop them together on an RS485 bus in a daisy chain. Several BACnet MSTP trunks were created each with up to 31 VAVs.

Customer requirement

To manage the premises and for optimal usage of facilities and energy a building management system (BMS) was installed. The system has a graphical user interface and specialized software for automation and decision making. This system enabled the operators to be alerted in case of alarm situations and also optimized the usage of resources. Remote monitoring and data acquisition from the heating and ventilation system was extremely crucial both from the energy management and operational perspectives. However it was not possible for the BMS to interact directly with the VAVs because of protocol incompatibility. The communication protocol supported by the BMS was BACnet IP while the VAVs only had a BACnet MSTP interface. A quick and effective solution was needed to quickly integrate the VAVs with the BMS. The offices were already operational hence the solution had to be such that could be
installed in minimal time and effort.

Solution provided

ProtoConvert analyzed the situation at hand and keeping in mind the limited implementation time at hand suggest the use of the BACnet router. The BACnet routers made the integration almost plug and play. With extremely minimal configuration (just a couple of clicks) it was possible to quickly integrate the VAVs with the BMS. An additional advantage was the web based diagnostic utility provided in the BACnet router. This enabled quick diagnostics and debugging of the network. Finally ProtoConvert team submitted a complete site report and discovered all the VAVs on BACnet IP using a 3rd party BACnet discovery software. ProtoConvert also helped the BMS team with questions and brining the VAV data into the BMS using the BACnet routers.

Results

The BACnet routers have been working on the site for over 2 years now and have proven to be extremely efficient and reliable. Also the customer and the site integrators have been extremely happy with the professional and timely services provided by the ProtoConvert team.