Security system design software is the tool that security engineers use to plan where every door reader, lock and camera in a building will go, and to produce the drawings automatically. They do this before anything is installed. The software covers two systems. One is physical access control, which decides who may open which door. The other is the camera system, which records the building on video.
Take, for example, a new 12-storey office building in Gurugram. The owner wants card readers on 140 doors and 220 cameras. A security engineer opens the floor plans that came from the architect's BIM software. He marks which doors need a card reader and which need only an alarm contact, a sensor that reports whether the door is open. He places each camera on the plan. The software draws the area that each camera can see, as a cone on the plan, so he can find corners that no camera covers. It also checks, at each camera's resolution, how far away a person's face can still be recognised.
From this one plan, the software produces the rest of the paperwork automatically. It draws a wiring diagram for every door: the reader, the lock, the exit button and the controller box that the door is wired to. It works out the cable route and length to each device. It also produces a bill of materials, the full list of parts with their quantities, which the installer uses to order the equipment and price the job. Drawn by hand, these drawings take a team several weeks. A change late in the project, such as 20 more doors, means redrawing many of them by hand.
The design also decides how the systems are set up later. The list of doors and readers goes into the access control software that runs the building. The list of cameras, with their places and settings, goes into the video management system (VMS), the software that records and shows the camera feeds. Today, the same card or phone credential often opens both the office door and the employee's laptop. This idea is called converged access control.
How is this different from AV design software? Both place devices on a floor plan and count cables. AV design places screens and speakers for meetings. Security design places readers and cameras, and it must also follow fire safety rules. For example, a door on an escape route must unlock when the fire alarm goes off.