Zentrum für Psychiatrie Südwürttemberg

The center considers a high building standard as enormously important to guarantee the appropriate patient environment for the best possible treatment and care. However, for the group’s 157 buildings, this objective can only be achieved with the most modern and technologically advanced building control technology. The prior building management software solution, with approximately 15,000 data points, as well as 500 overview and plant displays, eventually failed to live up to the expectations of the Administration and its multiple locations. The obsolete system was unable to process the required large amounts of data as desired. Data analysis was often delayed and would not show the current state of the building’s environmental conditions. Updates of the existing software were not possible, and development felt frozen in regard to HTML5 programming. These attributes frequently led to emergency staff meetings.

The ZfP chose system integrator/distributor MESALOGIC of Merneberg, Germany to manage the system upgrade. MESALOGIC chose Mitsubishi Electric Iconics Digital Solutions' GENESIS software for its new, more modern building control system and in particular selected the following platforms: GENESIS64™ HMI/SCADA and building automation suite, Hyper Historian™ rapid data historian, and KPIWorX™ self-service dashboard application for real-time and historical data.

GENESIS64 is now responsible for visualizing the process data of the whole instrumentation and control engineering system (including heating, ventilation, and air conditioning). Facility management personnel use the system to centrally monitor and coordinate all 157 buildings from ZfP’s administrative headquarters in Bad Schussenried, with the added benefit of being able to access the software from anywhere via web browser or mobile app.

Control processes are optimized with the aid of historical process data, and energy flows are recorded for higherlevel energy management. ZfP’s new portal now includes drag and drop functions for the approximately 15,000 data points, as well as extended alarm management. An additional MESALOGIC asset book, created to simplify daily work in facility management, combines user comments from trends and current setpoint changes from plant displays in a SQL Server database, while also providing the ability to manually input repair and maintenance data. The information from the multiple modules can be clearly displayed on a single screen for administrators or plant managers. If a manual entry is made, the system sends an automatic email notification to a selected group of recipients.

The biggest challenge of the project was the large number of buildings spread across the region. In order to centrally control the buildings from the administrative headquarters in Bad Schussenried, 130 BACnet controls had to be linked to 15,000 data points, while also ensuring secure access to all information via web browser. With the GENESIS and MESALOGIC installed solutions, more than 500 displays can now show the current state of any of the buildings across ZfP’s portfolio. In addition, a large portion of data from ZfP’s old system was ported to GENESIS64 with the assistance of MESALOGIC’s mechatronics and IT teams and some clever programming.

Following MESALOGIC’s installation of Mitsubishi Electric Iconics Digital Solutions' building controls software, ZfP has benefitted from transforming its old, faulty system into a new, modern, and technologically state-of-the-art visualization system. This migration was done in one step, so that a seamless transition and unrestricted use of GENESIS64 was made possible without major downtime.

The initial GENESIS deployment covered 127 out of 157 of ZfP’s buildings, with the remainder being brought online over time. GENESIS has allowed the ZfP to control and manage its buildings to provide an environment for the best possible treatment and care for its patients. MESALOGIC continues to support the ZfP as an IT service provider and additionally supports different modules, carries out special programming, and deploys system extensions. ZfP’s future plans include an expansion of the system based on HTML5.