UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The facility automation network group in Penn State’s Office of Physical Plant was honored with the prestigious IBcon Digie Award at the annual IBcon conference by Tempered Networks Inc.
OPP was recognized for its innovation and success in deploying the "Most Intelligent Building Project" on a college campus.
“It’s gratifying to have our smart building and IoT (Internet of Things) efforts acknowledged by the industry’s foremost entity focused on driving innovation and efficiency across real-estate operations,” said Tom Walker, systems design specialist in OPP. “Our increasingly connected world can certainly bring exciting opportunities and efficiencies, but we can only be successful if we can network systems in a highly secure and scalable way. We’re pleased that our team is making transformational contributions to advance smart building projects and initiatives in the market.”
The judges for the Digie awards selected Penn State based on these substantial project outcomes:
- With limited resources and a tight timeline, OPP staff completely restructured the network, segmenting the BACnet (building automation and control network) traffic into one of the most sophisticated university operational networks in the world.
- Converged networks from multiple building systems, including building automation, wastewater, water treatment, steam plants, electrical distribution, elevators and others, and is driving the data into an advanced analytics platform.
- Encrypted segmentation in network design significantly reduced security risk while substantially reducing cost of implementation.
OPP’s facility automation services group handles functions including automation engineering, network administration, and monitoring the University’s digitally connected buildings. The group was able to reduce its network attack surface and centralize control of hundreds of BACnet systems — without disrupting the legacy network — at a fraction of the time and a quarter of the cost of traditional alternatives like VLANs, firewalls, ACLs, etc.
Realcomm has been presenting the "Digie" Awards (short for Commercial Real Estate Digital Innovation Awards) since 1999 to recognize outstanding companies, real estate projects, technologies, and people who have gone “above and beyond” to positively impact the industry through the intelligent application of technology, automation and innovation.