Making the smart choice

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Mike Atkinson, managing director of Telematics.

Mike Atkinson, managing director of Telematics, examines the pros and cons of four Building Systems Integration schemes for smart buildings.

There's no doubt that Building Systems Integration has become the latest trend in Middle Eastern property development. As competition tightens and the global financial crunch encroaches on project budgets and operational targets, BSI is being sought as a practical and optimal approach to Smart Building (SB) rollouts.

Before going into BSI, a simple refresher on SBs is in order. A Smart Building basically capitalises on intelligent automation, modern communications and various other technology solutions to efficiently and economically operate, monitor and maintain a facility.

The various SB functions may range from security, surveillance and communications to temperature control and energy management. A problem with the earlier implementations of the SB concept was that subsystems were deployed independent of each other.

This led to redundant and often conflicting architectures, which ultimately increased costs and infrastructure overhead.

Enter Building Systems Integration, or BSI. Building Systems Integration was developed to harmonize all SB components into a seamless network, with integration occurring at the physical, network and application levels. Physical integration refers to the commonality of cabling, space, infrastructure support and open protocols, while application integration pertains to multiple system interoperability.

BSI champions the theory that the whole, referring to the integrated system, is greater in functionality than the sum of the parts, which are of course the individual building technology systems. Such a construct thus maximizes building connectivity both functionally and economically.

There is a major difference between integrated and interfaced building systems. Interfaced systems are individual systems that share data but continue to act as individual systems.

Integrated systems, on the other hand, share a single database, thereby avoiding the additional costs and support required in synchronizing disparate databases.

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