One characteristic feature concerning hospitals is the multitude of different rooms like operation rooms, recovery rooms, surgery, pharmacy, nurse´s station, entrance, patient´s rooms, therapy rooms, labors, pathology, etc.
As a result, the building management system has to deal with different requirements concerning temperature, shading, lighting, ventilation and function control. The reliability of the building automation system is of utmost importance. For this reason a main/backup solution might be interesting for hospitals. If the communication with the main server is interrupted, the connection to the backup server is activated automatically. The server still receives information from the building automation system.
Hospitals are places where the patients should recover. An intelligent building automation system can support this process by adapting the share of natural light and the room climate to the current needs of the patient. Furthermore, hospitals have areas with restricted access e.g. rooms where medicine is stored. In this case the integration of access control systems into the building automation system pays off.
In public hospitals, costs become important. Accordingly the building automation system should allow the recording and analysis of consumption values of smart meters. If this data can be stored in a database, the consumption of different periods can be compared. This might help to identify consumption peaks and saving potentials.
Often, hospitals consist of multiple, locally separated buildings in one area. To allow a central control anyhow, using clustering is one possibility. In this case every building has its own server, which acts as sub server. All sub servers are connected via Wide Area Network with one central main server. All sub server can operate independently, while the main server collects all data from the different buildings.
