University of Bristol

The UoB was looking for a modern, future proof solution platform that would allow them to continue to build new capabilities as new equipment and buildings were needed and connected to the Secure Data network (SDN). With this in mind they selected Cougar Automation Ltd., a Microsoft Certified Partner and winner of numerous customer experience awards, who in conjunction with Mitsubishi Electric Iconics Digital Solutions, provided a GENESIS-based visualisation solution. Together with a calendar scheduler to integrate and manage the Trend IQ2 and IQ3 BACnet controllers across the facilities, they received a single consistent head-end visualisation for all BMS functions allowing the University to reduce training and maintenance costs, another key driver of the SDN project.

The UoB needed a company with reliable software solutions that could meet the following objectives:

• Provide all departments of the University with accommodations of quality and functionality
• Ensure the most efficient use of all built space and deliver a plan to maximize future development
• Work to reduce the University’s carbon emissions
• Enable Building Management System (BMS), Fire Monitoring, Critical Alarms, Sustainability Monitoring, etc.
• Physically secure the network for the Estates Dept. 

To help achieve these objectives, especially regarding carbon emission reductions, the Estates team required access to information across the entire University campus. To that end, the University of Bristol commissioned the Secure Data Network (SDN) project.

With Mitsubishi Electric Iconics Digital Solutions’ products, Cougar Automation Ltd. was able to provide a solution that met the following SDN requirements:

• Connected to a wide range of devices
• Centralized Alarm Management
• Accessible from anywhere, worldwide
• User friendly
• Scalable and future-proof 

Due to the nature of the deployment, a collaborative approach to the project was undertaken by Mitsubishi Electric Iconics Digital Solutions application support engineers and Cougar Automation Ltd. They discovered that leveraging the open GENESIS64 infrastructure using OPC technology, SNMP, Web Services, BACnet and OLEDB, and utilizing the 64-bit web-based architecture, Cougar Automation Ltd. could create a modern and consistent user interface which could be accessed from a web browser anywhere within the UoB network and allow the Estates Office to control and manage the facilities. 

One of key benefits of using GENESIS64 for the Cougar project engineers, was the capability to perform remote web-based configuration through Workbench64. By enabling remote configuration, project engineers from other Cougar offices were able to collaborate and work on the project together with the Bristol-based engineers concurrently, on the same server. This reduced the overall project engineering costs and enabled the work to be completed much faster. 

The comprehensive alarms management capabilities in GENESIS64 also allowed critical BMS alarms to be routed to the Estates Security Office during non-working hours, by raising and lowering their priorities automatically, ensuring that critical facilities are continuously monitored 24 hours a day. In addition to the standard SCADA capability that GENESIS64 was able to provide, the Cougar project team also utilised GENESIS BizViz™ integration capabilities with great success.

The end result was exactly what the University of Bristol was looking for, as a Project Officer explains, “The GENESIS platform is very intuitive and user friendly and we are very happy with the product. It is more than capable of doing everything that we initially want it to do regarding the BMS and critical alarms communications, alarm handling, data storage and archive data handling. We will be extending it to incorporate security systems in the future and further extending it to incorporate as much as we possibly can because the system can handle it all.”