NACS and Facilities Management are jointly creating a network for monitoring and controlling campus heating and cooling (HVAC) equipment. This is one of a number of campus projects where NACS has assisted a department in design, planning, procurement, and implementation of a special-purpose networking project.
Facilities Management HVAC systems now connect in numerous ways, limiting centralized monitoring and control, and lack the high-speed communications needed to allow real-time management. Facilities Management has long envisioned a more effective system, but has been unable to get satisfactory assistance from outside consultants.
With the new network, every system in every building can be monitored and controlled 24 hours a day. The system will also support metering, capacity planning, and crisis management.
The network will be based on a Cisco gigabit backbone similar to UCInet including 6 core nodes supporting 60 buildings at 10 or 100 megabit/s. The system will be scalable and flexible with spare capacity and performance. This system will be independent of UCInet (and thus the Internet) for reasons of security.
Planning began in the Fall. Most of the equipment has been received and work crews have been hired. Fiber optic cable will be installed over the rest of the year, and the HVAC equipment will be hooked up early in 2002.