Welcome to the Technical Committee of the Building Automation, Control and Management (TC BACM)

This Technical Committee aims to serve as an interdisciplinary forum for research, development, production and integration in the broad field of Building Automation. Its goal is to build up an international network of experts and to establish synergies among institutes, companies and user organizations concerned.

Motivation and Scope

The economic benefits of Building Automation are undisputable. This can be attributed to a number of factors. Firstly, due to the emergence of Field Area Networks, the cost of design and integration, and especially maintenance, has been reduced significantly. Furthermore, higher level functions, such as energy optimization, security and safety, scenario variations or facility management, can only be realized with high performance building automation networks. The industry started developing standards for such networks about 15 years ago. Since Building Automation was proved to be a lucrative business prospect for the last 5 up to 7 years, it has also become a theme of the scientific and research community. It was therefore essential for the IEEE (and specifically the IES) to have taken the initiative to launch a forum where volunteers can propose activities to create synergies among involved researchers, user organizations and industry all over the world. Of course, for historical reasons, national standards in Building Automation can in some cases vary dramatically, but developments in the different international committees have shown that it is possible to set common standards, which can help to reduce the costs and increase the economic significance of this discipline. The field of Building Automation is rather comprehensive. We do not only have to include classical control networks like BACnet, KNX or LonWorks. Emerging themes like wireless networks, or aspects of safety and especially secure networks, and many others, have become increasingly important.

This is an open invitation to all interested parties supporting this initiative. Please send an e-mail to Dietmar Dietrich and indicate your interests and how you can contribute towards reaching our goals. We are very interested in receiving constructive remarks, criticism, ideas and help for the further enhancement of the activities of the Technical Committee on Building Automation, Control and Management.

Your sincerely,

Dietmar Dietrich & Peter Palensky
Co-Chairs of the IES TC BACM.