In the European standards activities, BACnet has been selected for use at both the management and automation levels. At both of these levels, BACnet is able to fully bring to bear its sophisticated capabilities. Because BACnet is available at both levels, there is no need for expensive gateways. Simple routers are adequate to interconnect different physical media and to manage the device loading. At present, a preferred use of BACnet is to integrate complete subsystems of various equipment types at the management level. This does not require BACnet's full functionality. Often gateways or special drivers (which themselves amount to gateways) are used. In the future, BACnet will be increasingly used at the automation level, also in the form of native BACnet devices.
