Corda Campus · Smart Buildings · Hasselt, Belgium

Energy under control at Europe’s largest tech campus

620 existing meters, one live view, brought online in two days with zero capital spent on new hardware.

All cases

The project

620 meters, one live view

How Corda Campus turned 620 meters from ten buildings and as many eras into one live, vendor-neutral view, without a rip-and-replace project, and without handing control to a single closed platform.

Corda Campus is the largest tech campus in Europe: 14 ha, 10 buildings, 70,000 m², and 250+ tenants who each need their own energy bill. Energy has become the least predictable line in any facility budget, and new EU efficiency and reporting rules only raise the bar for knowing consumption instead of estimating it. The campus already had that data, scattered across 620 meters and PLCs from different suppliers and different decades. Unifying it had to happen without ripping out equipment that still worked, and without trading one set of blind spots for a new dependency on a single closed platform.

Result

620 Existing meters, across ten buildings.

2 days To bring the whole campus online.

0 Meters or cabling replaced.

What we did

We built a vendor-neutral integration layer on open standards that retrofits onto the existing 620 meters and cabling, so no single supplier ever holds the only copy of the data. The old gateways were replaced with industrial PLCs. The meters themselves and their wiring were never touched. Every stream is stored in a Tier III datacenter in Belgium and delivered straight into the campus's Archibus FMS for automatic, per-tenant billing. For metering, the water meters run on M-Bus, the energy meters on Modbus, each read by the PLCs on their own protocol and brought together in Boolytics, without touching the meters themselves.

How we delivered it

Not one meter was replaced, and no cabling was touched. We replaced the ageing gateways with industrial PLCs, and the existing meter park kept doing its job. The whole campus was online within two days, with no capital risk on hardware that was never at fault. Because the readout now runs on industrial PLCs instead of passive gateways, the same installation is already fit for the next step whenever Corda Campus needs it: peak avoidance and load balancing on consumption that is already measured, not a future retrofit.

“I was not looking for another dashboard. I wanted the data in the system we already manage our buildings with, and that is where Boolytics puts it, in real time, without any effort on our side.”
Kathleen Bergé · Technical manager, Corda Campus

In detail

From meter to Archibus

The route a single reading takes across the campus: captured locally on a PLC, stored in Boolytics in a Belgian Tier III datacenter under Corda Campus's own control, and delivered to the systems the facility team already works in.

A plant room with two boilers, an expansion vessel and an insulated distribution manifold with valve actuators along the wall — One of the plant rooms: generation on the left, distribution on the right, and the control cabinet that reads both.

Technical detail

Four Beckhoff PLCs, spread across the campus, read the existing meters over M-Bus and Modbus TCP/RTU. Every reading is buffered locally on the PLC, so a network interruption never costs data: the buffer is caught up automatically once the link is back. From there the data goes over MQTT to Boolytics, stored per meter, per building and per tenant. Boolytics runs in a Tier III datacenter in Brussels with backup, not in the public cloud. The data stays Belgian and stays the property of Corda Campus, on open standards, so no lock-in. Cybersecurity was a design constraint, not an afterthought: OT is segmented from IT, the PLCs only make outbound connections, traffic is encrypted end to end, and access is role-based and logged.

In daily use

The facility team sees the whole campus in one place: consumption per building, per floor and per tenant, in real time and historically: the first line of defence when energy prices move overnight. Deviations surface on their own: a meter that stops reporting, consumption outside office hours, a peak nobody planned for. Tenant billing runs automatically, straight into Archibus, without anyone exporting or re-entering figures. The setup grows with the site (a new tenant, submeter or building joins the same data layer), and because it already runs on industrial PLCs, moving from monitoring to active steering is a configuration step, not a new project.