ICE, ASP version
By remotely connecting into a building's existing BMS, Lightwave Technologies' ICE system can automatically "learn" the building's thermal characteristics and response over time. As the intelligence is remotely located, this service operates in an Application Service Provider Mode (ASP) with a variety of cost models to suit different customer needs and requirements.
Whether it operates in ASP or embedded mode, Lightwave Technologies' ICE products functions as an Automated Energy Management Bureau, working 24/7 monitoring and optimizing a building's thermal energy usage. Using advanced neural-network systems, ICE remembers the space scheduling, weather, energy pricing, market demand and other conditions in effect at each moment in time.
The ICE system stores that information and then recognizes the ideal settings for each piece of equipment whenever similar sets of conditions occur in the future. It may take up to two weeks for the system to be fully trained and, as neural networks are constantly learning, its predictive power improves further over time.
ICE will select ideal settings for each piece of equipment and send those settings back to the equipment as real-time commands over the Internet. The customer's existing BMS system continues to control the building's individual HVAC systems with all the existing PID control loops that have been tuned for a building. However, ICE may issue different set-point values to such loops or calculate optimized on/off times for boiler functions based on the building's thermal characteristic and predictive environments. We call this "predictive optimal start-and-stop", and it is just one feature of ICE.
The Lightwave Technologies' ICE server resides in a secure, high-bandwidth, high redundancy facility with 99.9% uptime. It operates over a circuit or packet switched VPN, or over a public IP network using secure encrypted SSL or IPsec (for wireless telemetry data).
The customer has full remote control of the ICE system via his individual and personalized web-user interface. This is accessible via any web browser, allowing him to remotely run the system in automatic or supervisory mode, define working schedules or events which then link into the ICE intelligent energy-saving system, print reports showing energy saved per day, week or month in any building floor or zone, discover alarms and have alarms initiate an event such as an email or SMS event to alert technical persons on a fault, etc.
"ICE" also has a host of other "energy-saving" features, including setpoint optimization, and an "expert rule" base designed to make additional significant real-time energy savings after an detailed thermodynamic audit of your building by Lightwave Technologies' energy specialists.