Designing an effective SALT building management system (BMS)

The SALT Building Management System (BMS) was designed to control sub-system cooling and environmental control in the telescope chamber as part of ensuring optimal science data quality. With over 400 inputs and output points for monitoring and control, this required an effective system when performing maintenance in the event of any failure or degradation of the system. The BMS lacked this effectiveness due to an unstructured design and a lack of documentation, causing time-consuming root cause analysis and excessive downtime. In this paper, we describe the research and development of an effective Building Management System.