Facilities management has become a highly specialized engineering discipline with major professional societies dedicated to its further development both in the United States and abroad. See, for example, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) in the United States and the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) in the UK. Among the many goals of a facility manager is to reduce energy consumption, both for environmental and economic reasons.
An important tool in effective facilities management is the ability to electronically communicate with operating equipment (including controllers for such equipment) distributed within a facility, either from one or more centralized locations or locally. Examples of the types of operating equipment which can be monitored/controlled using such communication include lighting devices (e.g., incandescent lights, fluorescent lights, and/or LED lights), heating, air conditioning, and ventilation equipment and/or the controls for such equipment (e.g., thermostats in different parts of a facility), and in the case of a manufacturing plant, some or all of the equipment or equipment controllers used in manufacturing a product. In a typical application, different settings will be established for individual pieces of equipment or groups of equipment depending on such variables as the equipment's location in the facility, the type of equipment, the time of day, the day of the week, the season, the level of business activity (e.g., the number of manufacturing shifts), and the like.
To permit such communication, modern operating equipment and/or controllers for such equipment are often equipped with a communications port which allows a remote computer to set the equipment's operating state (e.g., on or off in the case of lighting, the set temperature of a thermostat, and the like). Various known methods can be used to connect the controlled device to the computer, e.g., hardwiring, Ethernet, or RF signals.
Unfortunately, the efficient categorizing of controlled equipment by location and/or type in a facility has proven to be a difficult problem. The current art uses the brute force approach of tagging each piece of equipment before it is installed and then making sure that each individual piece is installed at its intended location and that no substitutions take place during installation. As can be imagined, in practice, this approach can be a nightmare, especially for equipment which may have numerous repeats in a single facility (e.g., thermostats which can number in the hundreds and fluorescent fixtures which can number in the thousands for a major office building).
U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,284,689 and 7,503,478 to R. Clark Jeffery disclose equipment identification systems based on bar code or RFID tags. See also PCT Patent Publication No. WO 2006/077280. Significantly, none of these references deal with the real world situation where a given location in a facility will have multiple pieces of equipment that need categorization. In particular, these references do not disclose how to distinguish one piece of equipment from its neighbor and how to confirm that the desired piece of equipment has been categorized. The facilities manager is thus still left with the problem of verifying that his/her facility map is accurate and reliable. The present disclosure addresses this problem and provides solutions to the problem that can be efficiently implemented in a cost effective manner.
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