Building Automation: Where is it Today and Where it Should be

In early 1880s, building automation (BA) was born with the invention of a simple thermostat to control the boiler room temperature. Over the next century, building automation evolved from all pneumatic to digital controls for managing commercial building comfort systems. However, the potential of building automation has not been fully leveraged or realized. While sophisticated building automation systems (BASs) are used in large (>10,000 m2) buildings to manage systems, many buildings are not properly commissioned, operated, or maintained. Furthermore, over 85% of the commercial buildings stock in the U.S. does not use a BAS.In the U.S., if existing BAS are used effectively and low-cost BASs are deployed in commercial buildings that currently do not have BAS, almost 30% of commercial building energy consumption can be eliminated. Further, the increased—and desired—use of clean renewable energy from wind, solar and other sources can likely be optimized with intelligent electricity load management within buildings, which will help ensure, for example, that buildings quickly and methodically reduce energy consumption at times when wind or solar generation suddenly drops off and the grid struggles to make up the deficit.This presentation will highlight the evaluation of building automation, the current state building automation, where building automation should be and how building automation will allow seamless integration of buildings with the grid. The presentation will also show how building automation can be brought into the future by making building systems self-configuring, self-commissioning, self-learning, self-diagnosing, self-healing, and self-transacting-leading to a self-aware building state. To accomplish these advances in intelligent building automation, development of low-cost BASs for commercial building stock; automated fault detection and diagnostics, automated commissioning, and self-correcting and fault tolerant controls algorithms for building systems; and open and standard control protocol for homes are necessary.