IQVision upgrade at Imperial College London

ABEC have maintained Imperial College since 2012. As part of our proactive approach to ‘lifecycle planning’ we were in talks with ICL regards future proofing their Trend Supervisor with the launch of the new IQ Vision product.

The ICL Trend 963 is across many buildings and would represent one of the largest in the UK. It was therefore decided to carry out the initial project on 1 large building – SAF. This would give us the foundation to migrate further buildings over in time once the new IQV platform is working and fully operational.

The programme consisted of three main elements.

1. Information gathering onsite, as ABEC maintained the ICL campus information and software from the BMS system was easily available and the added 1st hand knowledge from our onsite team was invaluable.

2. Offsite engineering of the IQVision station, this included alarm class structure and graphics. The points from the BMS system had to be exported to a CSV file detailing the existing alarm setup. Once this was completed, we could set about to rationalise and, in some cases, add alarms. This was carried out in conjunction with the onsite FM team.

3. Onsite testing of the IQVision alarm system, graphics testing and alarms sent by email and finally system sign off.

This project was an early IQVision upgrade on a sizeable site. The building chosen was a key part of the ICL campus and a critical facility that very much needed latest technology front end software to monitor the BMS.

Part of the reason for the IQVision upgrade was to re-categorise and rationalise alarms into meaningful group so the maintenance teams could more effectively manage the BMS system, and remotely identify and fix minor issues on the BMS. The alarm grouping also had pre-event warning threshold added to try pre-empting problems in some critical areas of the building.

As the site was maintained by ABEC this made the project much easier to engineer and implement. The project was also run in close conjunction with the site FM team who provided the information on the alarm categories and any email recipients.