Practice 05
Building management, IoT and digital twin
A building already produces the data you want. It is stuck behind a proprietary head-end, a serial gateway and a vendor who bills by the point.
At a glance
We connect building and plant systems to a data plane you own, then build the energy, comfort and maintenance analytics on top.
Tools we use most
- BACnet/IP
- BACnet MS/TP
- Modbus RTU/TCP
- MQTT
- OPC UA
- Project Haystack
- Brick Schema
- TimescaleDB
- InfluxDB
- Grafana
- Node-RED
- Azure IoT Hub
- AWS IoT Core
Related work
Discuss thisWhat we get called in for
- A portfolio of buildings with four different BMS vendors and no combined view.
- Energy reporting that arrives monthly, as a PDF, six weeks late.
- A green-building or ESG commitment that now needs per-asset evidence.
- Chillers and AHUs running on schedules set during commissioning and never revisited.
- A new campus where the twin was promised in the tender and nobody has scoped it.
How we build it
Survey the estate honestly
Controller makes, protocol versions, point counts, network segmentation and which panels are genuinely reachable. Point lists from the commissioning file are usually optimistic.
Normalise at the edge
A gateway per site polls BACnet/IP, BACnet MS/TP and Modbus, applies a tagging standard such as Brick or Haystack, buffers through outages and pushes upstream over MQTT.
Keep OT and IT separated
Read-only by default, one-way flows where the client requires them, segmented networks and explicit approval before anything writes a setpoint.
Model the asset, not the point
A twin is only useful if it knows that this sensor belongs to that AHU serving those zones. The relationship model is the deliverable; the dashboard is a view of it.
Prove savings against a baseline
Weather-normalised baselines using an IPMVP-style option, so an efficiency claim survives a finance review.
What you get
- Point survey, protocol map and network topology assessment
- Edge gateway configuration with store-and-forward
- Normalised time-series platform with an asset and tagging model
- Energy, comfort and fault-detection analytics with alerting
- Weather-normalised baseline and savings measurement
- Handover to facilities: runbooks, escalation paths and training
Further reading
Next step
Tell us what you're trying to ship.
Send the brief, the RFP, or three messy sentences about the problem. You get a written point of view from an architect within two working days — not a sales deck.