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Anniversary – 30 years of BACnet Jubiläum – 30 Jahre BACnet

construction trade fair in Hanover. With computers placed between roof
tiles and concrete mixers – this, following a conversation with the fair
director Sepp Heckmann, was the impetus for CONSTRUCTEC ’94 and
’96, whose concept led to Light + Building with the Building Performance
Congress from 1998 onward. The nomenclature of CONSTRUCTEC was
Chapter 2.1.13 of the “Building Control” book.

BACnet is created

In 1990, before the first public review, Mike Newman renamed the ASHRAE
protocol to BACnet™ and had the name protected as a trademark for
ASHRAE.
Others wanted to name it “ASHnet”… to reduce buildings to ashes?
Fig. 12: 2000, the ISO/TC205 WG3 team for the development
of the global BACS standard ISO 16484-x (in Tromsø)
Abb. 12: 2000 Das ISO/TC205 WG3 Team zur Erarbeitung In August 1991, the first “Public Review” was published. By November,
der BACS-Weltnorm ISO 16484-x (in Tromsø) 507 comments from six countries had been received – most of them from
Europe. After the objections had been processed, the second draft was
published in March 1994. Steve Bushby was secretary for the first 13
years, then vice-chair and chairman of the committee.

See Fig. 11.

The third draft was released in spring 1995. In total, more than 741
comments from 81 commentators from 11 countries were submitted on
the three protocol drafts. The most difficult last-minute objection came
from Echelon Inc., with a threat of legal action. As a result, the LonTalk
protocol had to be included in the standard by reference to EIA/CEA-709.1B
“Control Network Protocol Specification” – otherwise the publication would
probably have been postponed indefinitely. At that time, I proposed EIB
as a “sister standard” to be mapped. “Mapping” means a normative
comparison for transferring protocol elements and functions from one
protocol to another. The BACnet–EIB/KNX mapping Addendum 2001-d
was included as Annex H.5 in Revision 1.4 in 2004. This shows that the
creation of the BACnet protocol was oriented toward consensus. The
method of representing information in the form of objects and properties,
which is independent of the type of processing, made the standard easy to
understand, and also to extend and adapt it.

In September 1995, the ASHRAE Board ratified the BACnet standard
and published it as ASHRAE 135-1995 BACnet. In December 1995,
BACnet was adopted by ANSI (American National Standards Institute) as
ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 135-1995 and published in January 1996. The
document already comprised 500 pages.

Ongoing development (now exactly 30 years)

In 1996, SSPC135 was established for the further development of the
standard. The first meeting of ISO/TC 205 (Building environment design)
took place in the same year in Harrogate (UK). There we founded WG
3 Building Automation and Control Systems Design. We agreed on close
cooperation with CEN/TC247 WG1 and WG3. I was “selected” as project
leader for the Building Automation and Control (BAC) standards. At the
Fig. 13: Founding of same time, we defined the acronym “BACS” as the English designation of
BIG-RU 2006 the global standard for Building Automation and Control systems.
Abb. 13: Gründung
der BIG-RU 2006
See Fig. 12.

Rise of the BIGs

On May 14, 1998 the BACnet Interest Group–Europe (BIG-EU) was

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