Two Approaches for Implementing & Improving Building Automation System (BAS)

Building Automation Systems (BAS) are used to both improve the indoor climate in buildings and to reduce the operational costs. In this paper, two approaches were used to implement a networked BAS. In the first one, Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) were used as the transporter of the measured samples which are forwarded to a central control room. We have deployed a medium scale WSN consists of 15 nodes and covers 12 rooms in an office building which is currently in-use. The second approach takes a new direction. In this method we suggest the use of an already installed network to carry measurement and control data of a centrally controlled air conditioning system. Our automation system will share the same network devices, transmission media and end points (i.e., PCs) with the traditional users of the network. We build our own programmable data acquisition card based on 8051 microcontroller, developing a LABVIEW based driver for this DAQ which forward the measured data to a LABVIEW based central control and monitoring PC.