Communication standards; past, present and future

The 10 year process of selecting European and international communications standards for use in building management has given official recognition to those standards gaining some success in the market. Meanwhile, the uptake of new open standards developed for the data communications, industrial control and IT industries continues irrespective of the official situation. In addition to employing Ethernet and TCP/IP data transport standards, higher level Internet protocols such as the HTTP, used for World Wide Web pages and XML data, are rapidly being adopted for building management. The industry now needs to adopt the XML format for the transfer of data into IT systems. The objects and services currently embodied in the BACnet protocol should be employed for both XML and other new technologies as they become adopted for building management.