The international BACnet standard, which ensures interoperability between building automation devices from different manufacturers, is steadily gaining in importance as new features are being added. Revision 12 delivers a series of innovations that Beckhoff has already implemented in its BACnet stack for TwinCAT.
To achieve intelligent automation that encompasses all of a building’s technical systems, the controller must have the information from each component at its disposal in order to coordinate them. Beckhoff provides the required basic software and hardware for such applications: the Bus Terminal system with 400 different I/O components that supports all common sensors and actuators, scalable controllers ranging from bus terminal controllers to embedded PC devices to powerful industrial PCs, and the TwinCAT automation software with its building automation PLC libraries.
Transparent integration of BACnet
Since a standards based communication architecture is key to vendor-independent building automation, Beckhoff has placed special emphasis on the transparent integration of BACnet in its TwinCAT automation solution.
The rail-mountable embedded PCs CX8091, CX9020, CX5010 and CX5020 are now certified as per BACnet standard Rev. 12. The controllers with stackable I/O levels provide scalable performance, ranging from the CX8091, which supports up to 250 BACnet objects in typical control applications, to the CX5020, which is recommended for applications with up to 3000 BACnet objects. Thanks to extensive performance improvements in comparison with Rev. 6, the controllers are now capable of processing more than twice the number of BACnet objects without a change in processor load.
The precise scalability of the Beckhoff building controllers on the basis of performance classes provides significant cost benefits. Users that require more processor performance can simply scale-up to the next controller platform.
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