Setting New Standards in Building Visualization
VMA Trusts atvise® for the ZIN in No(o)rd Real Estate Project
The building visualization for the ZIN in No(o)rd project is one of the largest of its kind for VMA. For over 14 years, the Belgian company has relied on atvise® for its Vmanager solution, making the choice of a visualization solution a straightforward decision for the people in charge of this major project.
Habsburgs in Mexico
Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph Maria of Austria, who lived in the 19th century, could not have known that a park named after him in Brussels would one day stand next to one of Belgium’s tallest skyscrapers. It is also highly unlikely that he was aware that an Austrian company would provide the software for visualizing the building.
Only a few steps would have taken him from Brussels North Station to the former World Trade Center, built in 1976. The building is located in the Nord / Noordwijk district, surrounded by other high-rises, and was one of the first of its kind in the Belgian capital.
WTC becomes ZIN in No(o)rd
The building, overlooking the National Basilica of the Sacred Heart, has undergone a total of three name changes. Its second name change was carried out by the Belgian construction company befimmo, which renamed it “ZIN in No(o)rd.” This marked the start of the partial demolition and complete redesign of the building in 2019.
The two towers of the World Trade Center, modeled after the New York original, were first stripped down to their structural framework and then connected to each other over several floors.
As a result, ZIN in No(o)rd has become a multifunctional building that meets the needs of multiple stakeholders. With six underground levels for parking and 31 floors above ground, this building offers a wide range of uses. The building houses apartments, workspaces, restaurants, retail spaces, a hotel, a sports complex, a parking garage, and much more. The Flemish government has also found a home in this unique building.
VMA places its trust in atvise®
To address the building visualization needs discussed earlier, the real estate developer turned to the CFE Group, also based in Belgium, which in turn entrusted its subsidiary, VMA, with the technical aspects of building management.
Part of this building management system is also building visualisation. VMA has relied on atvise® for over 14 years and can draw on a wealth of experience. The company uses SCADA and HMI solutions in all of its projects.
200,000 data points and beyond
Pascal Kinoo, Commercial Manager at VMA and head of the Building Management Systems team, sums up the challenge accurately: “The sheer scale of the project was probably the biggest challenge.” A visualization with more than 200,000 data points and 1,300 energy meters, along with the need to tailor the visualization to different user groups within the application, underscores the scale of this project. Even within these diverse requirements, the system accommodates multiple user groups with varying access permissions.
Even seemingly simple control systems, such as lighting control in different rooms, can be complex: factors such as energy efficiency, comfort requirements, and individual user needs call for precise configuration and flexible visualization. The concept of “smart automation” also plays a major role here. For example, algorithms control timers that dim or turn off the lights based on occupancy. An easy-to-use visualization interface makes these functions accessible and helps significantly increase energy efficiency at ZIN in No(o)rd.
At the time of implementation, ZIN in No(o)rd was the largest building project VMA had ever undertaken, and yet even given its scale, the choice of the visualization solution was never in question. “It just works!” explains Pascal Kinoo.
Dirk Stradiot, a software engineer at VMA for the past 10 years, oversaw the project from its initial conception through to its full and successful implementation. He agrees with his colleague’s assessment: “With a project like this, there’s very little room for error. Imagine an error rate of 1% across more than 30,000 lighting installations. That’s 30 lights that don’t work! That would be completely unacceptable.”
Big projects. Big decisions.
To keep error rates as low as possible, and to save time and consequently costs, VMA took a particularly careful approach with the first few floors. Since most of the floors have a similar layout, the first reference floor is of great importance; it is then replicated and adapted according to the conditions on each floor. This makes a mistake-free procedure essential, particularly in the early phases of the visualization project. This is no easy task, as different program codes typically run on multiple controllers. To work around this, a parameter is transmitted via OPC UA, which informs the controller of the specific floor it represents.
Dirk sums up the innovative nature of this solution perfectly when he says: “This was the first time we used this concept. It’s not something that’s widely used. At the end of the day, it was atvise® that made this approach possible in the first place.” Without atvise® and the use of a wide variety of technologies, this would not have been possible. Using simple upload mechanisms triggered from the atvise® engineering tool, the floor plan and the corresponding visualization are automatically generated. This represents a massive efficiency gain for everyone involved.
But VMA’s innovative capabilities don’t stop there. atvise® was also used in the ZIN in No(o)rd project to support commissioning—including the commissioning of DALI-based lighting (Digital Addressable Lighting Interface). Instead of manually assigning lighting installations on-site with pen and paper, addressing was performed directly via the visualization: light points were displayed on the floor plan and assigned live online via the web client. This significantly reduced the time required, minimized errors, and in some cases even enabled remote commissioning.
On Interfaces, Scalability, and High Flexibility
Thanks to the openness and flexibility of atvise® , additional interfaces to external systems could also be reliably implemented. The solution can be flexibly integrated with higher-level systems, such as energy monitoring systems. Thanks to the high scalability of atvise® , even large volumes of data and hundreds of thousands of data points can be reliably processed.
In addition to flexibility and scalability, atvise® provides additional benefits that VMA particularly values in large projects such as ZIN in No(o)rd. Dirk calls this “The Law of the Number” – the more data points and instances there are, the harder it becomes to manually track changes. Thanks to the type concept integrated into atvise® and its consistent object-oriented design, this process can be reliably automated. Changes are automatically applied to all instances, ensuring consistent and error-free updates. With over 200,000 data points, this is a significant advantage. This is particularly crucial in building automation, where last-minute changes are common.
In addition, the high flexibility of atvise® allows it to be adapted to projects with very specific requirements: Dirk describes it as follows: “With atvise® SCADA, we have an inverted pyramid.” – With predefined templates, you quickly reach your limits on such projects. Through server-side scripts, atvise® enables the complex calculations and logic required for such projects. “We have full control over the tools. We’re not tied to standard configurations,” Dirk explains in the interview.
atvise®: The All-Around Solution for Buildings
The project’s scale, the number of hardware components, and the integration with a wide variety of building systems—both centralized and decentralized—make atvise® the integrated system at ZIN in No(o)rd. This highly available, redundant system, which covers all building levels, provides a comprehensive overview and control through multiple web clients per floor. Lighting, heating, air conditioning, ventilation, and, last but not least, parking space monitoring with atvise® are essential components of the building automation system in VMA’s Vmanager software solution.
A grand finale
The visualization work was largely able to proceed independently of the construction project. It took VMA just two months to complete the visualization for this two-year real estate development project. The solution was quickly accepted and proved very popular. Thanks to its intuitive design, no in-depth training was required for users; they can identify relevant values and work with them in no time. Users can access the system via a web browser or through the 88 touch panels distributed throughout the building. These panels can display data on lighting, humidity, or carbon dioxide levels, for example.
By completing a project of this scale, VMA is significantly expanding its expertise and experience. By adding new elements to its template library, VMA will be able to shorten development times in the future and thus manage similar projects even more efficiently than before.
From ZIN in No(o)rd to Marie-Elisabeth Belpaire Building
Following its opening, the Flemish government—which also occupies office space in the building—carried out the third and, to date, final name change. From now on, the building is called the Marie-Elisabeth Belpaire Gebouw (Building). She was an advocate of the Flemish movement and may well have taken walks in the neighbouring Maximilian Park during her lifetime—a place that both Emperor Maximilian of Mexico and Marie-Elisabeth could have known during their lifetimes.
The fact that a Belgian building today bears the name of a Flemish writer, right next to a park dedicated to an Austrian, is a quiet coincidence of history. And it is precisely here that another chapter in this connection is now unfolding: a project that brings together Belgian and Austrian expertise and demonstrates just how natural this collaboration has become in modern building management.
And so the circle between the past and the present is complete—in a building that remarkably blends tradition, architecture, and contemporary design.