TA-23-C091 – Dude, Where’s My Data? Building Automation Trends and the Case-Driven Value of Converged Systems

The price drop of sensors and proliferation of many smaller sensor-enabled devices in the 2010s started a data revolution that has firmly infiltrated the building automation system (BAS) sector. Building owners and their consultants and contractors continue to become more obligated to access, curate, and store data from a variety of devices that use different communication protocols. This interoperability challenge has been known since the early days of direct digital control in buildings in the 1980s. In response in North America, the inception of BACnet occurred in 1987 when members of the automation industry attending an ASHRAE conference came “to the realization that the building industry needed a cost-effective way to integrate different systems from diverse vendors into one coherent automation and control system.” Over the next few decades, BACnet grew to have a protocol market share of over 80% in North America by 2017 according to the BSRIA. Despite the modern need for network harmonization to ease data management, BACnet gateway vendor growth has slowed significantly to less than 10% between 2014 and 2019. In addition, many IoT-focused communication protocols do not have default security settings and guidance (e.g., MQTT, Bluetooth) which can open unexpected security vulnerabilities at multiple levels of the BAS technology stack. While BACnet is not the only converged network communication protocol solution, it is the most common in the field in North America today and therefore is the focus of this paper. With the continual emergence of new protocols in the IoT and BAS control-adjacent fields, caution must be applied to enable data access and assert data security. This paper summarizes North American BAS trends in the commercial space, best practices with respect to data access in building automation systems, and presents a brief case study that demonstrates the value of network convergence and metadata. The goal of this paper is to assist the reader with understanding and assessing the value of their data in a typical commercial BAS implementation.