Doha Metro Novel Building Automation and Control System (BACS)

Abstract

Transport infrastructure projects -more often than not- face program delivery delays, budget overage and performance deficiencies. One of the root causes is the belated delivery of their data acquisition and control systems that turn out to be complicated and unable to provide the intended functions. To avoid this problem in Doha Metro, Qatar Rail designed and built an innovative building automation and control system (BACS) that was tested and commissioned easily, delivered without delays and functional defects and made possible the authorized start-up of revenue operations. Engineered with one central controller, one cluster of servers, one switched optical ring and multiple sensing and actuating devices on copper rings, BACS amalgamated automation technologies and data networking techniques over one common communication platform, offering seamless plant integration, undemanding scalability and straightforward maintainability. Implemented with hardware and software redundancies and fault recovery techniques, BACS was able to achieve safety integrity level (SIL) above 2, providing fire-life-safety (FLS) and mission critical functions. Hence, BACS was qualified by the Authority Having Jurisdiction, the Qatar Civil Defence Department of the Ministry of Interior, to initiate the required by the fire code effects in the detected by the fire alarm system causes (cause and effect functionality), in addition to the supply of daily control and supervision services with real-time automatic responses in Doha Metro.