The challenge
A major U.S. airline’s multibillion-dollar Terminal B program is rebuilding and expanding the terminal to handle more passengers and improve the hub experience at IAH. The airline needed to modernize its building automation and low-voltage systems across the terminal’s concourses without disrupting daily operations or slipping tightly constrained activation windows.
The brief to ACRI was clear:
- Don’t disrupt operations
- Don’t slip the window
- Make sure the systems work
Controls had to be invisible to passengers and reliable for operators. No dark gates, no surprise alarms, no impacts to flight banks.
Our role
ACRI was engaged to coordinate the building automation and low-voltage controls scope across a multiphase expansion of Terminal B at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. The goal was to maximize energy efficiency and reduce operating costs while ensuring a comfortable, safe environment for airport visitors.
Working alongside the airline’s facilities group, the program team, and the general contractor, ACRI:
- Supported design and sequence-of-operations review for BAS and SCADA
- Coordinated and reconciled 142 controls submittals across vendors and trades
- Provided field support and commissioning oversight across three active concourses
- Planned and supported cutover activities with zero tolerance for unplanned outages
Approach
ACRI’s focus was simple: make a very complex controls environment disappear into reliable, predictable operation.
- Tight design and submittal coordination. Standardized expectations for graphics, alarming, naming, and point lists across BAS, and flagged conflicts early between mechanical design, IT/OT networks, and controls sequences to avoid field rework.
- Cutover planning around live operations. Built step-by-step cutover plans aligned with building occupancy, gate utilization, and peak passenger flows, sequencing work across Concourses A, B, and C to maintain capacity and avoid critical flight banks.
- Commissioning with operators in mind. Verified that alarms, trends, and graphics matched how the airline’s operators actually work, and tested failover, fallback, and degraded modes to confirm resilient operation—not just point checkout.
Results
Through two phases of the Terminal B expansion, ACRI helped the airline coordinate controls upgrades across three concourses without a single unplanned outage, hit the activation window on time across two construction phases, and deliver BAS control systems that operators trusted on day one—with no visible disruption to passengers or gate operations.
For this client, success meant silence: gates stayed comfortable, schedules stayed intact, and the controls simply worked.
Ready for quiet, reliable controls?
If you’re planning a terminal, concourse, or airport-wide modernization and need controls that “just work” in a live environment, ACRI can help coordinate the building automation and low-voltage systems without putting operations at risk.