ORLANDO, Fla. - BACnet International and the EnOcean Alliance announced its cooperation with BACnet’s Wireless Networking-Working Group (WN-WG) to develop a vendor independent gateway specification for integrating EnOcean-based wireless energy-harvesting nodes into the world’s leading data communications protocol for building automation and control.

Recent meetings between the two organizations have opened the door to the full integration of wireless EnOcean and wired BACnet-enabled technologies, with the result that an EnOcean interoperability proposal has been drafted for the BACnet committee meeting that took place during the AHR Expo.

The working group’s current standardization efforts aim to ensure the interoperability of multiple EnOcean and BACnet solutions available today or in development, as well as future implementations.

“The task at hand is to define common implementation rules for an EnOcean/BACnet gateway,” said Dave Robin, chairman of the BACnet Technical Working Group. “This will entail a number of issues, including specifying the network topology and the BACnet/EnOcean objectives needed to define a single model so that all implementations will be interoperable.”

As the organization responsible for promoting the use of BACnet technologies for building automation, BACnet International sees this as a significant achievement. “The world has evolved towards a wired and wireless infrastructure, and it is a significant step to bridge these together with a standard mechanism for building automation suppliers and users,” said Andy McMillan, president of BACnet International and president and CEO of Teletrol Systems. “In the IT world, wired and wireless interoperability has long since been accomplished. I am very happy to be involved in the effort to make this available for the building automation industry.”

Leveraging the strengths of both technologies will create long-term value by allowing the existing wired BACnet infrastructure to seamlessly add wireless devices for additional functionality and greater energy savings.

For more information, visit www.enocean-alliance.org or www.bacnet.org.

Publication date: 02/15/2010