This is especially applicable for industrial buildings. Buildings are now seen not only as a "a place to work" but an integral part to business operations that contribute directly to the overheads, which finally determine the dollars and cents the company earn. This will also determine your competitiveness affected from the building performance.
Today's competitive demand pressure the management to look for services and tools that enabled control, integration and able to mirror business needs more closely while reducing the operating costs. At another end, the growing expectation for comfort had set the service level higher that require an advanced managerial instruments.
Benefit of BMS
As an oversight and monitoring functions, BMS is capable of:
- Building Operational Condition Monitoring And Control
- Energy management
How Does BMS Work?
The BMS consists of Automation Control Solution and related Application Management. An airport represents a unique pattern of building management requirements. Its distributed environments require many specialized control systems. There are Fire & Security systems and Lighting & Process Management (under mechanical and engineering) requirements, which could be of multi-vendor subsystems. BMS monitors and controls the various building services within the airport facilities through hardwiring and software information interchange with other systems.
The challenge of BMS is to make subsystems work as if they were part of a single management environment. In order for BMS to work, it requires a central system to run the system and its communication, field controllers to control the transfer of data from one end to another, field sensor that receives a signal or stimulus and responds to it in a distinctive manner (in this case it could be temperature sensor, humidity sensor, kilowatt hour sensor, tank level sensor, flow switches, water meter and gas meter), and system interface - a program that controls a display for the user (usually on a computer monitor) and that allows the user to interact with the system.
Issues on BMS Implementation: Real-Life situations
Among issues faced when installing the BMS are:
- Readiness of other system/facilities directly affect BMS system efficiency. To ensure an efficient energy management by BMS, other system/facilities need to be ready for linkage/interface/integration with BMS system for data/information provided on online basis. The design characteristics of each component with respect to reliability, availability and maintainability is the key factor.
- System Configuration and design incompatibility. BMS System needs to be configured according to electrical circuit design in order to work well.
- Interface Issue - compatibility of subsystems with BMS. Interface could only be successful should there be similar protocol, and compatible sub-system, i.e. equipment had already reached its life expectancy/ wear and tear @ obsolete, faulty commissioning for linkage, interface card failure and others.
- People culture -alert message. The point of alert message provided to the user when malfunction of facilities occurs. Users of the system must be prepared and willing to commit to take further action upon receiving the trigger.
The abovementioned situation implicates:
- Usage of the system could not be optimised
- Status of some facilities could not be monitored or controlled
- Reliable information could not be attained
- Hinders economic and efficient resources utilisation
