HVAC
CREATE VALUE WITH MORE INTEGRATION IN BUILDING AUTOMATION CONTROLLERS
B
uilding automation systems (BAS) integrate lighting, energy, HVAC, safety, and security
into a single intuitive system, balancing the optimum efficiency of the building’s operation with the productivity and comfort of its occupants. While the building automation market is very conservative, it has seen considerable growth mostly driven by rising energy prices, increasing awareness regarding energy conservation, and growing government initiatives in areas of fire safety and security. New standards and regulations, such as the UL 217 standard for smoke alarms, have taken effect to make buildings safer, more efficient, and more comfortable. Trends like these stimulate the development of new building automation products and solutions, pushing manufacturers to deliver new technology in shorter development cycles. This change of pace creates opportunities for BAS companies to meet these needs with flexible system solutions that are platformized, offering lower power and smaller size. Building automation controllers are a typical
example of a product that often lacks the innovative agility so valued in today’s fast- changing markets. The controllers are the brains of the BAS. They take the data from the sensors deployed throughout the building and execute the system’s response. That means the controllers need to have a certain number of input and output channels. Some controllers only offer fixed channel functionality, resulting in architectures with unused channels. These extra unused channels have an associated cost that cannot be recouped from the customer; however, enabling full reconfigurability of each channel ensures all channels can be used. In an ideal scenario,
Figure 1. Improving return on investment at every stage of development with the AD74412R.
the BAS should have a limited number of spare, unused channels so that the customer does not pay for functionality that is not utilised. Enabling full configurability of the channel function provides the most flexibility in the design and deployment of a BAS. Traditionally, building automation controllers
have used discrete implementations for both fixed and configurable channels. However, the bill of materials (BOM) of discretely implemented configurable channel controllers can include hundreds of components. After years of development, the discrete solutions have become very efficient and optimised to reduce BOM costs in order to match the expectations of this cost-
sensitive market. Nonetheless, new trends and more demand for agile development underline some major drawbacks of this approach, such as the complexity of the planning, design, production, and logistics of too many product variants in the building automation controllers. Therefore, the BAS solutions must be assessed based on the total cost of ownership rather than on a simplified BOM cost point of view.
Figure 2. Any function on any pin with software-configurable I/O.
INTEGRATED VS. DISCRETE The ability to reconfigure the channel as required is the right approach to eliminate unused channels, but this alone does not address the other shortcomings of controller design. The key concept is the integration that enables the channel design to be simplified, with a smaller footprint and better performance. With an integrated solution, the function of any channel can be easily configured using software commands. Software-configurable input/ output (I/O) technology opens up possibilities of easy design reuse and platformization that ultimately reduce the total cost of ownership of a BAS solution and create value throughout the product life cycle of the building automation controllers (see Figure 1). The first stage of a controller development is the system architecture. At this point, all
40 MAY 2022 | FACTORY&HANDLINGSOLUTIONS
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