BMS and central dispatching for a hotel complex

The brief

A hotel operator was consolidating the control of mechanical plant that had grown up piecemeal — ventilation, heat substation, pumps, water storage and common area lighting each had their own local control, and the duty engineer had to walk the building to establish what was running.

What we did

We designed a single BMS layer over the existing plant: controller topology, network architecture, and the integration schedule for the equipment that already spoke Modbus. Seven control panels were designed from scratch, with schematics detailed to terminal level for the panel builder.

The dispatching station was designed around what a duty engineer actually does at 3 a.m. — a plant overview screen, one screen per system, and an alarm list prioritized into three levels, with the third level suppressed from the main view entirely.

Delivery notes

Alarm rationalization was where most of the value landed. A raw points list of 320 signals generates an alarm flood that operators learn to ignore. We classified each point as critical, actionable or informational, and configured the station so only the first two categories interrupt. The client reported roughly twelve alarms per week reaching the operator after commissioning.

We supported start-up remotely over four weeks, taking site queries each morning and issuing revised logic or corrected drawings the same working day.