As smart buildings continue to rise in prominence across the UK, Duncan Greene, project infrastructure lead at One Sightsolutions, reviews the various critical elements of smart enablement
As we enter 2025, the world of smart buildings is rapidly evolving, presenting both opportunities and challenges.
Smart enablement is key to harnessing the full potential of these buildings, but what exactly does it entail? And what are the best practices that can be applied?
Smart enablement is about seamlessly integrating the various systems within a building to ensure that data is readily available to other systems, both existing and future.
This requires a deep understanding of the different systems, their communication protocols, and security considerations.
Choosing the right protocols
A plethora of systems can be integrated within a smart building, ranging from lighting and HVAC to security and AV. Fortunately, many of these systems utilise widely established industry-standard protocols such as BACnet, KNX and DALI.
While certification guarantees that devices adhere to various elements of these standards, it is crucial to delve into the details to ensure they offer the specific functionality required for your smart enablement goals.
MQTT, a lightweight communication protocol, often goes hand-in-hand with smart enablement, especially when integrating with cloud-based analytical tools.
Just as HTML is used to structure web pages transferred via HTTP, a well-defined structure is needed for data transferred via MQTT too. A format such as JSON can be used in combination with well-defined JSON schemas to ensure that data from different sources is encoded in the same way every time.
Prioritising security
With smart building systems increasingly relying on IP networks, the attack surface expands significantly.
Converged IP networks, where various services share the same network infrastructure, have become the norm. Collaboration between IT and OT professionals is essential.
OT professionals should advise IT teams on the necessary segregation, specifying which devices need to communicate and through which protocols. This allows IT teams to handle routing, firewalling and secure remote access effectively.
Standards bodies are proactively addressing security concerns too. The KNX Association has standardised KNX IP Secure and KNX Data Secure for encrypted communication. ASHRAE has followed with BACnet/SC to help secure BACnet communications over IP.
For MQTT, employing MQTT over TLS with certificate-based user authentication is recommended. Proper management and deployment of valid certificates to devices, known as deploying a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), is crucial.
Government legislation, such as the Product Security & Telecommunications Infrastructure (PSTI) Act, mandates minimum security requirements for consumer connectable products, including prohibiting universal default passwords and requiring vulnerability reporting mechanisms. While targeted at consumer products, these regulations may influence the commercial sector in the future.
Establishing naming conventions
Equipment naming should avoid mutable information and focus on providing essential context.
The Building Device Naming Standards (BDNS) initiative offers a source of inspiration, providing abbreviations for building devices and naming principles. While BDNS allows for encoding spatial or zonal information numerically, caution is advised to avoid ambiguity.
Point naming requires consistency to facilitate readability for both humans and computers.
Google’s Digital Building Ontology (DBO) project, with its concept of fields and subfields, offers a standardised approach. DBO prescribes a specific order of terms, ensuring uniformity and ease of interpretation for all parties involved.
The importance of testing and validation
Thorough testing, including proof of concepts, factory acceptance tests and site acceptance tests, is crucial to ensure the system’s functionality and security.
Validation, often overlooked, is paramount in smart enablement. It involves verifying the accuracy and consistency of point values, names, devices and other crucial aspects. This is achieved by asking a series of questions about the data. Regular expressions can be used to validate equipment names, ensuring they conform to established conventions such as BDNS.
Tools like One Sightsolutions’ Smart Build Connect can automate the validation process, checking for duplicates, validating MQTT topics and more.
Validation should be an ongoing process throughout the building’s lifecycle to accommodate changes and ensure continued integrity.
Key takeaways and resources
By following these best practices and utilising the available resources, we can start to navigate the complexities of smart enablement, creating truly intelligent buildings that are secure, efficient and future-ready.
Best practices for smart enablement:
- Choose widely established and futureproofed protocols and systems.
- Ensure you can extract device and points lists for validation.
- Collaborate with IT teams on security and PKI management.
- Adopt a clear and consistent naming convention and communicate it to all stakeholders.
- Conduct thorough testing at every stage.
- Make validation an ongoing process.
Resources for further information:
• Digital Building Council (DBC): A non-profit organisation promoting collaboration and best practices in the smart building industry.
• One Sightsolutions: A company specialising in smart building solutions and offering tools like Smart Build Connect to assist with Smart Enablement Delivery.
