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LONworks standards are updated regularly, and now take into account the smart grid and modern kitchens.
As building automation becomes more important for energy efficiency, convenience, and the bottom line, engineers and building owners demand systems that can incorporate products of varying brands in an open-bid market. LONmark has developed and advanced the LONworks protocol to manage these changing technologies, allowing engineers, owners, and contractors to choose the products that work best, cost less, and communicate with the network.
With constant updates to the existing protocol and development of new "smart" technologies, the standards appear to be advancing as quickly as the technology they integrate.
Smart grid
Plans for an American smart grid have included lofty numbers and goals for some of the nation's biggest companies, and LONmark is one of them. The National Institute of Standards and Technology brought together LONmark and other private companies to help create the Smart Grid Standards Roadmap and recommend a list of standards that should be included in the development of the nation's smart grid. In the proposed American smart grid, buildings will have "smart" electric meters that can feed information back to the electrical grid regarding a building's energy use. The smart grid will know when a substation fails and will be able to redirect power from other sources to avoid outages, as well as intelligently manage power from less consistent sources like wind turbines or solar panels. With its capacity for two-way communications and demand-response devices, LONworks hopes to play a big role in the future smart grid.
"LONworks enables various products to interoperate, and smart grid systems can be shared with other products without having to restructure an...