There is a lot of talk about the concept of IoT in the industry, but its implementation has remained quite underwhelming. This is surprising since the benefits of IoT in sectors like building management systems is unquestioned.
There is a lot of talk about the concept of IoT in the industry, but its implementation has remained quite underwhelming. This is surprising since the benefits of IoT in sectors like building management systems is unquestioned.
But then why hasn’t IoT become more popular yet? This was the question that Tony Marshallsay, Chief Mechanical Engineer at Omrania & Associates tried to answer at a recent webinar organized along with Memoori.
To understand the IoT situation it is important to start with a bit of history, according to Mashallsay. Mechanical controls have been there for thousands of years. Electromechanical thermostats have been with us since the end of the 19th century, but they were expensive, affordable only for factories and big buildings.
The silicon chip changed all that. With the arrival of devices like the IBM PC, there came large groups of startups that were hungry for business and had easier means to technology. Eventually this became too big and the market began consolidating.
At present we have buildings that are growing taller, so the control networks are growing. Equipment are getting more sophisticated, generating more data. Clients, often designers, want better performance. Ecologists want to save energy and improve the environment. BAS suppliers want to have the management of all this in their own basket, but they can’t because there are plenty of people with good excuses for wanting a slice of the action.
“The result is that most building projects have to live with a jumble of BAS that looks like something out of a junkyard challenge,” Marshallsay said. “It is not as bad as it might have been a decade ago, due to ongoing market consolidation…but there is still a lot of interfacing required and the IoT won’t be able to live with that.”
So what’s preventing the IoT from taking off?
Marshallsay compared the situation to a hub airport with an aircraft at the start of the runway. Its winter time and it’s been snowing. It’s not enough to shutdown flying, but it’s enough to create puddles of snow all along the runway. “Pilot knows there is too much for the plane to reach takeoff speed, so we ask the airfield crew to clear them. That takes time, and meanwhile the queue of planes that is waiting to take off is getting longer.”
Now imagine it’s the IoT future. There is a lot more planes lined up waiting for takeoff. So the result is lots of delayed and angry passengers who are misconnecting flights with other hubs along their journey. So for the IoT, we have to minimize the slush from the get-go.
What is the slush?
It’s data processing overhead. You have to have it for conversion of measured analog values from sensors to digital data and it is necessary when every smart device that’s connected to a data bus has to check every delivery basket to see if it’s meant for it.
“But it shouldn’t be necessary, for transferring data between different sections of a BAS network, but presently it is,” Marshallsay said. “Because different sections use different protocols. So protocol translation has to happen at the interfaces.” He went on to draw the analogy of two railway lines to explain the situation, before concluding on a solution that he proposed could be an answer to the issue.