Background to EDE

The BACnet Interest Group (BIG-EU), the European trade association for the application of the global BACnet standard ISO 16484–5, defined a format for distributing BACnet data-point lists. Here is a brief background to the concept of their definition.

In a multi vendor system, engineering data needs to be exchanged between interacting parties. In a BACnet system, it is normally expected that engineering data, such as data point object properties is exchanged by means of BACnet online discovery which is supported by most server and client devices. However this data exchange by definition, can only be accomplished online and is also dependent upon the BACnet discovery functionality being available in both the server and client. When this functionality is unavailable, It has proved necessary to obtain the engineering data in an offline condition. It is also needed when the server device has to be setup with its engineering data before it is installed and operational on a BACnet site network or when the client devices are unavailable for online discovery.

It was with this in mind that in 1999, the BIG-EU began a project to define a data format so that BACnet engineering data could be made available. The original concept was to provide only the BACnet data-point list in a simple human readable form via a Comma-Separated Value (CSV) file. The general format actually consists of four different CSV sheets and collectively they are commonly known as the EDE (Engineering Data Exchange) files, after the BIG-EU description document which defines them and is called Engineering Data Exchange Template for BACnet Systems.

BIG-EU continued to develop the EDE concept and in February 2007 the BIG-EU Technical Working Group at the Milano-meeting, approved Version 2.2 of the EDE-layout and its description. This is the latest version of the EDE files definition. Over the years that the EDE definition has been available, many BACnet equipment vendors have adopted the EDE file format to define and distribute the point content of their devices and some vendors have included an EDE file import mechanism in their server device to provide offline engineering programming.

 

NOTE: It is noted that whilst to date there is no other generally adopted equivalent solution, the EDE it is not extensive in its data content and its reliability cannot be guaranteed. You should be cautious and aware that the data in the EDE is not as extensive as the data discovered online and data discrepancies can occur when discovering online after the EDE has been initially used offline to build the server engineering database. The original concept of a human readable file containing the BACnet data-point list was never intended to be a machine-to-machine (M2M) data exchange format but it has become adopted by BACnet product vendors as the de facto standard for M2M data exchange.