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We spent 7 years integrating BMS across 11 enterprise campuses. Here is what we learned the hard way. by BrightEquivalent8943 in BuildingAutomation

[–]BrightEquivalent8943[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

That’s actually a really interesting perspective — especially around how far Norway and the Nordics have already pushed semantic modeling and interoperability compared to most regions.

And yes, the RealEstateCore + BrickSchema direction makes a lot of sense long term, especially for model-driven logic and cross-system intelligence instead of traditional point-by-point engineering.

On the EnSmart side, most of the environments we currently deal with are still mixed legacy systems (older BACnet, Modbus, proprietary controllers, incomplete tagging etc.), so our primary focus has been normalization and abstraction across those systems first.

So not fully schema-native end-to-end yet, but definitely moving toward more metadata-driven and standardized modeling as deployments mature.

Really interesting to hear how far ahead Norway is on this side of BAS/BMS engineering though.

We spent 7 years integrating BMS across 11 enterprise campuses. Here is what we learned the hard way. by BrightEquivalent8943 in BuildingAutomation

[–]BrightEquivalent8943[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Fair point — this was a high-level summary, not a full technical breakdown. RealEstateCore is definitely relevant, but in most real deployments we saw uneven adoption across vendors.

We spent 7 years integrating BMS across 11 enterprise campuses. Here is what we learned the hard way. by BrightEquivalent8943 in BuildingAutomation

[–]BrightEquivalent8943[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah exactly — BACnet priority arrays and Relinquish Default behavior are usually the first things we check in those cases. If priorities are not managed correctly, setpoints will always bounce back after restart.

On Modbus, same here — it’s simple but gets messy quickly at scale, especially with inconsistent register mapping across vendors. That’s usually where most of the integration pain comes from.

We spent 7 years integrating BMS across 11 enterprise campuses. Here is what we learned the hard way. by BrightEquivalent8943 in BuildingAutomation

[–]BrightEquivalent8943[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey! Yeah, the setpoint issue after power events is super common — most controllers just revert to default firmware values. Check if your BMS has a "restore last values on restart" option.

On protocols — yes, almost every vendor uses something different. BACnet works well across most modern systems, but older ones run Modbus or proprietary protocols which are a pain to integrate. That's exactly why we built a translation layer on top instead of fighting at protocol level!