Today’s complex buildings requires countless disparate systems and devices to regulate their functions and environments. Many of these systems operate in silos yet are still interdependent in many ways. With the Internet of Things (IoT) as the heart of smart building management, personnel tasked with monitoring, adjusting, and intervening in those functions when necessary have a holistic view into building operations. Industrial tablets become a vital link to overcoming the greater challenge of interpreting data from many building automation systems in real-time.

With the help of the IoT, buildings have the potential to house truly interoperable systems rather than silos of electrical, mechanical, and electro-mechanical systems and platforms. Sensors gather continuous data feedback on operational parameters across these systems.

Controllers, gateways, sensors, and cloud platforms can then deliver valuable information that enables building management teams to increase energy efficiency, quickly address failures, and preemptively address imminent problems. Together, this increases comfort and reliability and helps cut costs. By communicating with each other, these systems:

  • Help monitor themselves
  • Act when necessary through automatic regulation of defined operational parameters
  • Provide operational performance data to drive analytics
This collectively allows facility managers to intelligently optimize performance and create smarter buildings.

While data centers and central maintenance offices provide networked facilities for efficiently managing an array of facilities remotely, in-building operations demand operator access to information. A tablet provides a platform that can communicate via network to management facilities for historic data, instructions, and spare parts databases, while simultaneously communicating directly with in-building infrastructure.

It is tempting to use a commercial Android tablet for industrial operations, given their widespread availability and use. However, the environments, operational use cases, and connectivity requirements required of industrial use often cause commercial Android tablets to fail in these types of missions.

Industrial tablets, on the other hand, can provide the connectivity, features, and ability to withstand those environment variables while providing a reliable operational experience. Rugged packaging provides protection against drops, impact, moisture, fluids, and more, while the electronics is designed for use across wide temperature ranges – often -30°C to 65°C or more. Commercial tablets are more typically rated between 0°C and 45°C. Industrial tablets can also implement custom wired and wireless interfaces to HVAC and other industrial equipment. Wireless connections to equipment networked with ZigBee, Sigfox, and Lora can be made directly from the tablet.

Just as custom devices increasingly drive industry 4.0, they will also play a growing role in smart building management.

Another challenge is how building automation systems produce an enormous amount of data that can’t be fully grasped or acted upon by building management staff. Using sophisticated analytics programs via an industrial Android tablet connected to the cloud can provide the transparency for those vital adjustments. Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms can further support optimization through building self-diagnosis.

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