What's new in the BACnet standard?

BACnet is an open networking protocol that has been designed specifically to meet the communication needs of building automation and control systems for applications such as HVAC, lighting, access control, and fire detection. BACnet-compliant products are manufactured by hundreds of companies world wide.

The 2016 version of the BACnet standard (ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 135-2016) was just published by ASHRAE, and it contains significant new functionality that will be implemented in products (including the Cimetrics BACstac and BACstac/DN protocol stacks) over the next few years.  Here are a few highlights.

• There are new standard object types for elevators, lighting control, and network management.
• A specification for how BACnet devices can directly communicate on IPv6 networks has been added.
• Web services for integration between enterprise systems and building automation systems have been completely redesigned, with greatly improved functionality.  The new web services are based on RESTful principles.
• Semantic tags can be attached to any BACnet object, allowing an object's purpose to be described in a machine-interpretable way. The BACnet committee and Project Haystack are developing standard tag sets.
• Consulting engineers will benefit from several new BACnet device profiles, which will make it easier to specify BACnet functionality in building control products.

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