Certainly one of the most challenging tasks for most consulting mechanical engineers today is writing comprehensive specifications and evaluating proposals for a class of equipment which has become known as Building Automation Systems. Reasons for the difficulty encountered run all the way from a non-standard and confusing terminology; i.e., semantics, to the rigid fee schedule which is a part of the construction industry. Some of the difficulty exists for reasons over which the engineering community has some control and some exists for reasons which appear to be as a result of the rather "sudden" development of small, low-cost minicomputers and their arrival on the building automation scene.

Automation Construction Technology, Inc. was hired as Building Automation Systems Consultants by K/M Associates, an Elkhart, Indiana A.E. Firm, for a new laboratory/office building at Miles Laboratories. Acting in that capacity, we worked with K/M and the owner to develop a set of specifications which encouraged careful and competitive bidding by the control manufacturers, evaluated the proposals and as a result, made a substantiated recommendation to the owner regarding the "best" system.

In subsequent sections of this paper, we further discuss the various problems associated with Building Automation System specification and evaluation from the point-of-view of the consulting engineer, outline the development of specifications for the Miles Laboratory project and describe the evaluation procedure developed. In the final section, we outline the improvements in technique which we feel are necessary and outline the role we feel that a Building Atuomation Consultant can and will play.