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In the building controls market, an evolution is taking place. Manufacturers are embracing open systems at a fast rate, and benefits are being realised daily.

The advantages of a single infrastructure reach into almost every aspect of a facility, including reduced up-front construction costs, lower life-cycle costs, improved system management, enhanced back office reporting, better service and proactive maintenance.

Industry-wide standards are being adopted from industry-best practices, and a new breed of controls contractor – the master systems integrator (MSI) – is emerging.

So what’s driving these changes? Arguably, the widest sweeping change in the building controls market has been the definition and promotion of an open-standard device-level protocol for communication.

Device-level makers are building devices with internal communications to allow their products to talk with other products from other makers without the need for custom design, re-engineering, or closed toolsets.

The LonTalk Protocol and Lonworks are examples of a technology that started as a simple idea, but over the past few years it has emerged as one of the most widely deployed open building control systems in the world today, with nearly 100 million installed devices.

New, better products will replace traditionally used ones. As the market opens up, competition will follow and innovation will be paramount.

Through all these changes, who do we rely on to make all this technology work for us? Welcome the master systems integrator, who for years has been installing our closed-systems hardware.

Independent systems integrators are evolving into a greater source of knowledge and experience. They are taking on the role of adviser and technology partner. They now have the option to buy products from dozens of manufacturers and create a portfolio of products that meet their customers’ requirements.

New specification process

A key element of the MSI’s responsibility is the need to integrate the facility into the overall enterprise. This requires a more IT-centric approach to integration.

The MSI now has to have technically savvy engineers who understand and can efficiently design a fully integrated IT facility solution. They must know all the current security, ethernet and router standards and be able to cost-effectively deploy working systems that can adapt, scale, and change over time.

Industry-wide standards are being adopted from industry-best practices and a new breed of controls contractor – the master systems integrator – is emerging

Owners are thinking more out of the box, where the box is a single building. They are thinking about campuses, multiple-building projects and geographically diverse collections of facilities all connected to one common management console with one common user interface.

The new systems management office looks more like an IT data centre than a facilities manager’s basement closet.

How does the MSI work with the mechanical/controls contractor, and what are their individual responsibilities?

In the market a two-tier specification is coming out of the engineering sector. One spec is for the particular building controls for a project and the other is for the integration of that building into the master plan or overall enterprise.

The controls spec defines the working requirements of the facility with all related control sequences – what we see today on a single-building project.

The second spec, sometimes referred to as the facility master system integration (FMSI) spec defines how each building is connected to a common graphical user interface, how the higher-level monitoring and control are to be performed and what the user interface standards should look like.

We are also seeing the role of the MSI increasing to include monitoring submittals and as-built engineering documents to ensure they are meeting the scope of the spec. The MSI then becomes an ‘on par’ contractor to a mechanical or electrical contractor and has overreaching responsibility to integrate all the various subsystems in a facility, independent of which subcontractor is responsible for the installation and controls.

One primary reason for the separation of these two specs is to encourage fair competitive bidding on both the initial installation and the longer-term service contracts.

Some project owners require that the bidders for the controls cannot bid on the MSI and vice-versa. This helps reduce the sole-source, proprietary lock when the hardware, software, integration and service are all tied to one bidder.

Splitting the spec into two allows for bidders to bid on separate buildings on a multi-building campus, and also offers a common graphical interface design and implementation for the entire campus/enterprise.

By following standard IT architectures and specifying non-proprietary open architectures, the options increase and costs are more easily managed.