Technical facility management for distributed properties

This was also already a topic at the forum for vendor-neutral building control technology on November 3, 2016 at Stuttgart Airport.

What are your requirements for technical building equipment (TGA) in the operation of your buildings or distributed properties? According to the current standardization (GEFMA 122), operational management includes in particular energy management, maintenance and repair as central tasks; cost and contract management includes in particular accounting and the monitoring of external service providers.

The requirements for the technical building equipment resulting from these tasks include the following

• Provision of data for energy management
• Monitoring and alarming to ensure operation
• Support for troubleshooting or data recording
• Ability to involve a variety of external service providers
• Monitoring of contract performance

In addition, there must be options for central asset management or remote management, and data must be made available for other facility management applications, such as maintenance and repair, order coordination or cost center accounting. A Herculean task? No, not today.

If you take a closer look at the three major fields of action, you will see: The necessary management functions such as energy management, alarm management, plant visualization, time switching, remote management or also functions for reporting, analysis and data management can be easily accessed in the newly introduced ICONAG TGM portal, where TGM stands for technical building management. The portal combines management functions from different sites, properties, buildings and facilities in the simplest possible way and also provides useful, aggregated information on the current condition of the facility as well as contact persons, weather data, etc. for each site.

Data transfer from the properties
A solution for data transmission from the properties to the central office is no longer a real hurdle. Here, too, a turnkey solution was presented in Stuttgart. The preconfigured modems and routers use transmission and security technologies that have been tried and tested thousands of times and originated in the networking of banks. This means that any external service provider can also be granted secure external access to the systems and management functions released for them.

Technical integration
The technical integration of the data and functions from the buildings and systems is where things get exciting. Today, open systems such as BACnet, KNX, ModBus, M-Bus, etc. are no longer an obstacle to integration at data point level. But who wants to completely replicate or replace the local building control system in order to implement the central management tasks? Even the possibility of sourcing all distributed building control systems from just one manufacturer is either impractical or undesirable.

ICONAG TGM Portal
That's why the real challenge here is how to access existing, more proprietary building management systems across manufacturers. The ICONAG TGM Portal also solves this task using state-of-the-art network technologies. As soon as any BMS system or even a control panel or visualization system is integrated into the (TGM) network, it can also be easily integrated into the ICONAG TGM Portal. For this purpose, ICONAG relies on state-of-the-art web technology in conjunction with standards for data transmission, web services and IT administration, as used in the management of large networks.

With the existing tools, virtually all integration scenarios for distributed buildings and systems can thus be solved.