Foyernet
Building ManagementHow Foyernet Transformed Building Management with Serverless IoT Solution
About Foyernet
Foyernet is an organization with a vision to have a seamless building management experience. The Platform combines devices and data across all buildings into a unified cloud-based data lake. The data lake supports real-time and historical analysis to track utilization, provides alerts, detects faults, and provides insights.
The Challenge
The client was confronted with the formidable task of providing precise resource consumption data (including water, power, and cooling) to their tenants while using consumption data as the foundation for billing processes.
The challenge was to gain a comprehensive understanding of how resources were being consumed, forecast demand, and tackle undersupply, over-usage, leakage, and other obstacles. The existing metering systems were not automated, leading to multiple incidents of incorrect data or difficulties in generating bills.
The process of bill generation was also cumbersome and relied heavily on semi-automated or even manual calculations based on manual meter readings. Real-time anomalies of usage spikes or odd meter readings went unnoticed until the end of the month. This led to wasted effort in identifying the root cause and caused disputes when bills were generated.
Our Goals
FoyerNet partnered with AntStack to build a platform that provides Billing and Cost Management features to consumers. The goals on our agenda were:
- Develop and implement an automated resource consumption monitoring system to accurately track and report water, power, and cooling usage data for tenants.
- Improve billing accuracy and efficiency by automating the process and eliminating errors caused by manual calculations and data entry.
- Enable real-time anomaly detection and alerts for unusual spikes or consumption patterns, reducing the likelihood of billing disputes and enabling proactive identification of issues.
- Provide the client with deeper insights into resource usage patterns to support demand planning, resource optimization, and cost control initiatives.
- Enhance tenant satisfaction and engagement by providing more transparent and accurate data on their resource usage and associated costs.
- Support the client’s sustainability goals by promoting more efficient resource usage and reducing waste.
To ensure reliability, AntStack installed the IOT gateway on-premises with redundant connectivity to the cloud.
The gateway translates BACnet and Modbus messages to JSON and transmits them using MQTT, enabling devices to communicate with the cloud.
To enable the meters to send data to a cloud-based controller and data acquisition system, AntStack connected these meters to controllers using existing technology and protocols such as Modbus, MBus or BACnet.
The web application provided user functionality via web and mobile, while an API layer enabled third-party data access by tenants.
