Real answers for climate-neutral renovation at a unique living lab

The challenge

A normal building management system is built to run itself: the opposite of what a research site needs. Across three renovation typologies, an office building and the technical backbone, KU Leuven's researchers had to be able to override any single valve, sensor or setpoint without disrupting the rest of the site, and keep that access as the research questions themselves keep evolving over the years ahead. Most off-the-shelf building control fights you the moment you try to bypass its own logic.

What we did

We built the full control layer on Beckhoff hardware: nine PLCs across three terraced houses and the office building, more than 7,500 control points, one central server. Every component (HVAC, lighting, shading, metering, the backbone's energy and water flows) sits on the same open-standards data layer, addressable on its own rather than folded into a closed sequence. That is what makes the site future-proof: a new sensor, a new experiment or the next research phase plugs into the same layer instead of triggering a redesign. Around 250 network ports and a virtualised server environment carry the platform, behind a firewall that separates the OT network from research and office traffic.

How we delivered it

Every installation can be driven three ways: automatically, manually, or remotely by a researcher's own script or model, the mode that fits the experiment, without rewiring anything or waiting on us. Secure remote access lets KU Leuven and Boolean reach the site from outside. We delivered in step with the construction of the site, and the same architecture is what lets it keep growing: Boolean stays available for support and for whatever the next research phase adds, without starting over.