Functional safety in building automation

Building automation systems comprise services to automatically control, monitor and manage buildings with key areas being heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, lighting and shading. Typically, they do not provide safety-related services that are handled in a stand-alone fashion. However, a tight integration should allow the sharing of transmission path and the possibility of message exchange between the different application domains (e.g., lighting and fire alarm). Still, the integrity and adequate performance of all integrated applications must be assured. This paper surveys general safety standards and application dependent standards and points out what requirements have to be met by a safety-related building automation technology. The focus is on fire alarm and social alarm systems, due to their prevalence in today's buildings. Without question, demands in these domains are high and a challenge to meet. For this reason, the paper concludes with the proposal for a safety enhancement for KNX/EIB.