The KNX Association is thrilled to be part of the IP-BLiS (IP – Building & Lighting Standards) market interest group.
The vision of IP-BLiS is to make commercial buildings more responsive to the needs of users by promoting a secure, multi-standard, IP-based harmonised IoT solution. Harmonisation of access to an IP network with connected building automation products allowing for better integration.
This multi-party liaison between BACnet International, KNX Association, Open Connectivity Foundation, Thread Group, and the Zigbee Alliance, will work together to educate and influence the market regarding application framework standards over IP for commercial building connectivity through marketing and communications.
The participating organizations recognize that there are challenges in current building management systems. Building technologies are siloed meaning that for the different domains such as building access, energy, lighting, etc. different and proprietary technologies are used. There is currently no technology that fulfils all use cases needed to automate a commercial building. With the siloed technologies, the industry can’t create the synergy that is needed.
An approach to remove these barriers and provide truly smart buildings is to converge lighting control and building management systems with IT networks into a secure all-IP-based configuration. With this convergence comes true IP networking making data of the various building automation application protocols accessible via an IP address (instead of an application protocol specific address). The move to IP eliminates the need for hardware-based gateways and enables gateways between the systems to be pure software solutions since all devices communicate over a secure IP connection. This convergence also means that different physical IP layers can be used leading to seamless integration of wired and wireless connectivity options to reduce installation costs.
Through IP-BLiS, technologies from BACnet, KNX, OCF and Zigbee will have consistent interfacing to physical IP layers delivering on co-existence. For instance, Thread, Wi-Fi and Ethernet are such IP-based networking layers already deployed in the market that are application layer agnostic.
IP connectivity is crucial to supporting new use cases, apps and services with end-to-end security.
Webinar
Thursday, June 25, 2020 at 8:00am PDT / 5:00pm CET
Register to attend the debut webinar to learn more about IP-BLiS.
(Ed: There is a video recording of the IP-BLiS Open Webinar which you can watch to learn more and you can also download the presentation slides.)
