Building Management Systems

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02/03/2017

Nowadays, it is increasingly important that public buildings are as energy efficient as possible. This is a not only a global trend for new buildings but also for existing ones. One such building is the St Teilo’s High School in Cardiff, Wales. Built in 2014 to BREEAM Excellence, the building already has a state of the art building management system. However, having so many meters/sensors monitored made it hard sometimes to locate what the problem was. Thus, an additional heating monitoring solution was required to simplify where heat was dispersed – creating heating zones. This required the installation of heat meters in 9 locations, 2 of them in the Ground floor and 7 in the First floor. Advanticsys fully wireless solution supporting M-Bus and Modbus RTU / TCP was chosen by the School and Cardiff Council due to the non-intrusive nature of the installation, with little preparatory work needed resulting in a cost reduction compared to other wired alternatives. The solution included the following equipment:

  • Wireless M-Bus T1 Heat meters. Being battery-operated, they were the best option to avoid power wires deployment. They included 2 PT500 temperature sensors.
  • DM-108 wireless bridges. Supporting both Wireless M-Bus and Modbus RTU, they provide seamless connectivity between heat meters and data concentrators.
  • MPC-333 data concentrators. They logged and sent heat meters data to the cloud platform in 15 minutes intervals using FTP.

Once every device is properly configured put in place, via the Concordia Cloud platform, the user can access each meters data, develop customized dashboards and be able to download data for further analysis. The platform also includes events notification by email. The data collected on a local FTP server at the school, and sent to a central Council FTP from the MPC-333 data concentrators. Sending data to multiple FTPs is another useful feature of the wireless solution.

Mathew Preece, Energy Projects Manager at Cardiff Council, states that “using Advanticsys wireless communication bridges and data collectors allowed work to be carried out with less disruption to the school (no need for wires). It is early days for the project, but it is envisaged that this high level overview of heating the school via the zones created by the heat meters will allow the facility manager to optimise his time and prioritise his work load based on sections of the school that are causing problems from overheating.”

More information about our building management solutions can be found here.


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26/01/2017

Advanticsys recently presented European Energaware project during the Sustainable Energy Week Conference organized by the European Commission in Brussels from 19th to 25th June 2017.

The main objective of the EnerGAware project is to reduce energy consumption and emissions by 15-30% in a social housing pilot in Plymouth (UK) by increasing tenants’ understanding and engagement in energy efficiency through the development of a serious game. Thus, energy savings virtually achieved in the game and in reality (through the real-time measurement of household energy consumption) enable progression in the serious game. Social media features offer users a platform to share their achievements, compete with each other, give energy advice and join together to form virtual energy communities. Since February 2015, a total of 100 social houses are participating in the pilot.

Energaware game

A plug&play wireless energy monitoring kit was designed and deployed by Advanticsys in each household. Little intervention was needed thanks to the selection of suitable devices to collect consumption information from legacy gas and electricity meters as well as to group data collected and send to the remote data server for further analysis. Therefore, the monitoring infrastructure used in the project is as follows:

  • Wireless M-Bus LED pulse sensor for electricity meters.
  • Wireless M-Bus OCR camera sensor for gas meters.
  • Data collection cabinet including our DM-108 wireless bridges, supporting both Wireless M-Bus and Modbus RTU and our UCM-316 data concentrator. They logged and sent meters data to the cloud platform in 15 minutes intervals.

Energaware, coordinated by Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña, has been funded by the Horizon 2020 European Union Research and Innovation Programe, and its duration is three years. More information can be found at project dedicated website .


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24/01/2017

Advanticsys extends its projects portfolio with an automated meter reading project in one of the largest District Heating/Cooling networks in the south of Europe, operated by Spanish company Sampol. In particular, this project, located in Palma (Majorca – Spain) provides heating and cooling to the Balearic Islands University (UIB) and the Balearic Islands Innovation Park “Parc Bit”. Built in 2000, it comprises a tri-generation plant providing heating and/or cooling to 25 different customers.

Sampol, as DHC operator, requested an end-to-end solution for remotely collecting meters data previously installed. Advanticsys deployed a system based on its datalogger MPC-330 with M-Bus interfaces to read data from Kamstrup meters and to send them periodically through csv files to a remote server. In parallel, a Modbus TCP connection was enabled to support real time data collection from company SCADA.

Spanish DSO selects Advanticsys monitoring solutions for district heating and cooling project

Through this project, Sampol expects to improve network efficiency and as well as the simplicity of securely collecting data.

More information about our smart grid solutions can be found here.


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12/03/2014

ADVANTICSYS has successfully completed the European project GreenerBuildings . The consortium, composed of companies from several countries, including Technical University of Eindhoven and Philips, has developed a novel service oriented architecture applied to building automation systems, achieving reductions in energy consumption and improvement of comfort by monitoring user activity.

The main objective of GreenerBuildings is to achieve a more efficient energy usage inside the building while ensuring user comfort. Nowadays, people spend a great deal of time in buildings, may these be offices, hospitals or commercial buildings. While active indoor, people desire to have comforting lighting and microclimate conditions that adapt to their daily activity and wishes.

GreenerBuildings has gone one step further from traditional building management systems, not only with the deployment of sensors for ambient and light data gathering, but also other sensors capable of monitoring the specific activity a user is carrying out at each moment, all of it by installing a great number of wireless sensors and actuators throughout the building, capable of communicating among them and collectively forwarding their data to the system.

With the help of these sensors, the system is for example capable of detecting whether a user is working at his desk, therefore reducing the ambient light conditions in the rest of the room. At the same time, whenever the user leaves his desk, it can disconnect non-essential devices such as the computer monitor or the lights. The system allows as well the addition of virtual sensors like a user agenda or calendar, and by analyzing the use of the different rooms throughout the day is capable of setting up the ambient conditions in advance.

This increment in the number of devices is exponential depending on the size of the building, reaching up to a thousand in a standard office building. To manage this large amount of information, it is necessary to have a robust and easily scalable architecture, capable of receiving the data from the sensors, adapt it, analyze it and together with the rules established by the user, carry on the necessary control actions.

This is why it was decided that a distributed service oriented architecture had to be developed, acting as a building management service, even on top an already existing one in the building. This open and flexible approach allows third parties the addition of new complementary services easily, the adaptation of the system over existing infrastructures, and the scalability from one unique building to hundreds of them, due to the distributed computation tools used.

The project carried out pilots in several buildings in Netherlands, achieving savings of up to 20% of electric consumption . Surveys conducted clearly showed that the system maintained or improved in certain cases the user satisfaction in relation to comfort perceived.

GreenerBuildings has been funded by the Seventh Framework Program of the EU, and its duration has been three years.


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