Smart buildings with Nexto Xpress

With support for a wide variety of communication protocols and interfaces, Nexto Xpress, the first standalone PLC with embedded I/O in the Nexto family, was created to bring performance and high connectivity to most applications in Industry 4.0. By combining it with SCADA/HMI BluePlant supervisory software, Altus creates an agile and complete solution to manage different types of projects in the Building segment. Today, to demonstrate the capabilities of this combination of products to  the operation’s manager, we brought an application case in which the Xpress + BluePlant solution is used in the automation of a Building Management System (BMS).

In the example, the implemented solution is responsible for control and supervision of the lighting, electrical and hydraulic processes of the building, optimizing its operation and reducing the high consumption of these resources. For this case, we indicated the use of an architecture where Nexto Xpress acts as a central controller, interacting with both the supervisory and field equipment. As it supports the main Ethernet communication protocols, the equipment can communicate directly with the SCADA system, providing data for decision making and receiving instructions through the OPC UA protocol. The feature also allows the controller to communicate directly with most relevant cloud hosting services on the market, such as Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Google One and Amazon AWS.

In this case, the BMS system is also responsible for controlling other building subsystems, such as lighting and air conditioning; activation of doors, locks, escalators and elevators; fire detection and alarm; as well as management of utility and power systems. Here, Xpress uses its digital and analog I/O points to communicate with sensors, scanners, drives and other smart devices responsible for monitoring and triggering field instruments. There is also the possibility of using other product features to carry out this communication, such as the CAN and USB interfaces.

Check  in the following image how the architecture would look for this demand:

In this application, in addition to a reduction of around 30% in power costs, the control provided by the system would also have the capability to reduce water consumption and the emission of harmful  gases  to nature, minimizing the environmental impact that the operation of the building could cause.

BluePlant newest version brings new features

BluePlant added new features in its newest version. Now, the SCADA software from Altus has debugging scripts for insertion of Breakpoints and a completely remodeled library with new symbols and objects to maximize your experience in creating screens. In addition, the software will also support the OPC UA Client and SNMP Manager protocols, native SQL database and maps with georeferencing.

Do you want to know everything about BluePlant and still have the possibility to test the tool? Click here and download the demo version of Altus SCADA/HMI software.

Would you like to know more about the new Nexto Series solution and find out how it can bring your business to the reality of Industry 4.0? Click here and contact our sales team!