ATLANTA - A large collection of new technologies for emerging applications is contained in the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineer’s (ASHRAE’s) newly published BACnet® standard. ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 135-2010, BACnet – A Data Communication Protocol for Building Automation and Control Networks, allows building equipment and systems manufactured by different companies to work together. It is the only open, consensus-developed standard in the building controls industry, according to ASHRAE. The new standard contains 19 addenda approved since the 2008 standard was published.

“The 2010 version of the standard represents a large amount of work in a short amount of time by the BACnet committee,” Dave Robin, committee chair, said. “In just two years, the committee has added a wide variety of new technologies and contributed more than 400 pages to the standard.”

The standard contains several new ways to communicate: wireless communications is provided for applications where wired networks are impractical or expensive; a new XML vocabulary is provided for complex standard and proprietary data and metadata; a new character encoding method is provided for greater flexibility and compatibility with international text; and new state-of-the-art network security is defined to allow the creation of highly secure communications channels for sensitive data.

It also adds higher speeds for MS/TP networks and wiring guidance for optically isolated segments; new requirements for workstations and the definition of new kinds of workstations; new engineering units to support smart grid and other emerging applications; a new Global Group object for gathering, monitoring, and distributing sets of data; six new objects to support physical access control; and 12 new objects to support the full complement of all data types, including strings.

To order, contact ASHRAE Customer Service at 800-527-4723 (United States and Canada) or 404-636-8400 (worldwide), or visit www.ashrae.org/bookstore.

Publication date: 05/23/2011