Configure locations

Modified on Tue, 26 Sep, 2023 at 8:38 AM

Configure locations¶

The area covered by the smartengine installation may be organized into smaller spaces like offices, corridors, break rooms etc., so that specific behaviors may be assigned to them. These spaces can be organized in a hierarchy such as buildings, floors, sections, offices and so on. This hierarchical organization is displayed as a tree called Location Tree with the top of the tree represented by an entity called All Locations. This node is created in the system by default and cannot be removed.

A sample location tree hierarchy

All Locations
- Building 1
  - Floor 1
    - Corridor
    - Office A
    - Office B
    - Office C
    - Kitchen
  - Floor 2
  - Floor 3
- Building 2
  - Floor 1
  - Floor 2
- Building 3
  - Floor 1
  - Floor 2

The hierarchical location structure may be created in two ways:

Visit each location and create child locations under them.
Import Locations from a spreadsheet.

Each location has an associated type definition. There are predefined types such as conference room, office, corridor etc., or new custom types can be defined. The location types can be used for advanced analysis of sensor data.

Importing Locations and Fixtures Settings¶

Careful planning before the installation can be used to simplify the setup of a large scale installation. Defining the locations, and assigning the fixtures to the locations can be a time consuming exercise, but it needs to be done correctly for proper functioning of a space. If adequate preparation is done, then most of the information required can be saved as a spreadsheet, which can then be imported into the system using the smartmanager.

Location and fixture commissioning spreadsheet

The spreadsheet covers a section of the installation (a floor or subset of the floor). Separate spreadsheets can be created for different parts of the installation.
The spreadsheet contains one row for each smartengine endpoint (a smartsensor, gateway or wall controller).
Each row specifies a connection identification string (such as a patch panel drop identifier or any other identification for the cabling drops), name of location where the endpoint is located, name of the engine and port where the connection is terminated, along with name for the fixture that can be used to identify the endpoint in the smartmanager user interface.

Use the Import Locations dialog launched by clicking the corresponding button in the Locations section on the Commission System application. The dialog allows you to create an initial top level hierarchy such as building and floor and associate the spreadsheet information with one of the nodes in the tree.

All locations defined in the rows are created under the the selected node with which the information is associated
Fixture connectivity information (engine and port) is saved. It is not uncommon for this connection information to be inconsistent with actual cabling. Therefore, the fixture assignment to location as well as naming is performed in a separate step where you can visit each location, test the fixtures, and confirm them before making the assignments permanent. This is described in the Configure Fixtures section.

Tip

You can create the locations as well as set up the hierarchy offline. However, fixture commissioning has to be performed onsite.