Requirements concerning a building’s technical systems can be quite complex. There are many of such systems—power systems, cooling systems, ventilation systems etc.—and few of these systems can be regarded as stand-alone systems. Many of them interface with others and their performance must be considered holistically. To be able to deal with this complexity, we have now made it possible to be more specific about interface relations in BriefBuilder.
For example: now, you cannot only define that there should be an interface relation between the building’s management system (BMS) and the air quality sensors, but also that it should be a data-exchange relation (‘sends data to’ / ‘receives data from’). In similar fashion, you can define relations like ‘controls / is controlled by’ or ‘supplies air to / receives air from’ etc. All this is entirely flexible as you can easily define these interface relations yourself in the settings menu.
Being able to be more specific about interfaces between systems—and easily communicating these by means of a diagram or matrix—is important as it helps to reduce the risk of design conflicts, quality problems and misalignment between the involved disciplines.
More info about interface relations can be found in our knowledge base, e.g. about interface diagrams.