Product capability
Virtual commissioning gives building automation and integration teams a repeatable environment for testing system behavior before a real building, lab, or complete device stack is available. SPX combines behavior-rich virtual devices, protocol connections, runtime state, and scenario execution in one controllable environment.
Common use cases
- Validate BACnet and KNX integration logic before onsite commissioning.
- Rehearse schedules, alarms, overrides, interlocks, and recovery behavior.
- Test gateways and supervisory systems across mixed protocol stacks.
- Reproduce timing, sensor, and communication failures deterministically.
- Run the same commissioning checks locally and in CI.
Related protocol examples
Related quickstarts
Why virtual commissioning is hard
Commissioning failures often appear at the system level. A device may behave correctly in isolation while schedules, gateways, priorities, alarms, and timing interactions fail when the full integration is assembled.
Physical buildings and complete labs are expensive to access and difficult to reset. That makes it hard to reproduce an issue, compare a change, or run the same validation after every update.
How SPX supports virtual commissioning
SPX exposes realistic communication surfaces while keeping the environment controllable:
- Model-based devices keep state and respond to meaningful inputs.
- Protocol simulators expose BACnet, KNX, Modbus, and MQTT behavior.
- Scenarios move systems through normal, degraded, offline, and recovery states.
- Runtime logs and live state make timing and ordering issues easier to inspect.
- Python and Docker workflows make commissioning checks repeatable.
From lab to CI
The same virtual environment can support exploratory integration work, a commissioning checklist, and an automated regression run. Teams can start a known pack, apply a deterministic scenario, inspect the resulting state, and retain diagnostics when a check fails.
This does not replace final validation against the real installation. It moves the repeatable, high-volume part of the work earlier, before onsite time is the only way to discover an integration problem.