Introduction
Buildings are integral to our daily lives, providing shelter and facilitating work, but in modern society, we should expect them to do more. Buildings, like individuals, are key units that make up a city and should contribute to the city’s well-being.
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- Empowering cities through intelligent and productive buildings
- Building as part of a natural ecosystem
- Smart building examples in the context of a smart city
- Enhancing building intelligence for a better future
- Enhancing building intelligence: Strategies for data insights and communication
- Leveraging user-friendly technologies in smart building design
- Unlocking business potential: Smart building opportunities for real estate owners and app developers
- Building operating systems and semantic modeling: Enabling the future of smart buildings
- Future outlook (conclusion): The evolution of intelligent commercial buildings
Empowering cities through intelligent and productive buildings
To understand how buildings can contribute to a city, it’s essential to consider the various stakeholders within the city, including residents, local governments, energy providers, and objects such as cars and streetlights.
By mapping out the needs and capabilities of each stakeholder, potential collaborations can be identified, such as exchanging data and physical resources like energy and parking spaces.
Building as part of a natural ecosystem
A generic commercial building needs energy, water, data about its environment, and maintenance. At the same time, with the use of smart building technology, it can provide data from sensors and equipment and resources like EV charging stations and parking spaces.
By mapping out the needs and capabilities of other stakeholders, such as local governments and energy grids, the potential for collaboration becomes clearer.
Smart building examples in the context of a smart city
What is a smart building?
A smart building is a structure that utilizes advanced technology to optimize its operations and improve the experience of its occupants.
These technologies include the use of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, building management systems, and digital twins, to name a few.
These tools work together to help the building efficiently use resources such as energy, water, and lighting, while also maintaining a safe and comfortable environment for those who occupy it.
Real-world smart city applications
Smart buildings play a crucial role in the functioning of smart cities by optimizing resource usage and improving occupants’ experience.
One example of a smart city application is the integration of buildings and cars. Buildings can offer extra capacity in their parking spaces or available electric vehicle (EV) chargers for vehicles to use. At the same time, cars can share data such as outside temperature, rain detection, and air quality with nearby buildings to optimize their operations.
Resource and knowledge sharing between buildings
Another example is resource and knowledge sharing between neighboring buildings. For instance, excess electrical energy in one building, produced by solar panels, can be transferred to a nearby building or back to the local electrical grid or energy storage.
Generic and specific data can also be shared, such as the outside temperature sensor values used by many facilities for their heating and cooling control algorithms. By comparing the building’s local sensor value with similar sensors in neighboring buildings or cars around the same location, possible issues with this sensor, for instance, can be more easily detected, and the incorrect value can be replaced with the average value of the sensors in neighboring buildings until the issue is resolved. Thus avoiding unnecessary energy consumption and discomfort for occupants.
Collaboration and coordination among city stakeholders: Leveraging the interconnectivity of smart buildings
Exchanging data can also assist a building in exhibiting a “social behavior”, especially when sharing resources with other city stakeholders. For example, if a district heating plant supplies an area with many buildings, and one of them is a “high-priority” building, such as a hospital, then other buildings that are connected to the same heating network can automatically lower their own hot water consumption – if the hospital urgently needs that. This can be applied in case of a malfunction in the hospital’s equipment, the district heating station’s equipment, or if there is a more general crisis mandating the need to prioritize certain buildings over others, like an energy crisis or a natural disaster.
These examples require buildings to express requirements, offer city-level services, and exchange data to organize, communicate, and align with other city stakeholders in a standardized way.
Enhancing building intelligence for a better future
The imperative for improving building intelligence
The current state of buildings, particularly newer ones, is that their systems may be connected internally, but they are not equipped to fully utilize the potential of smart building technology and are still in their own silos when seen from a macro city-level.
Even though buildings have a set of standardized communication protocols in place, they are primarily designed for system integrators and specialists to connect different systems during the building’s construction phase, especially within areas of heating, ventilation, air conditioning, lighting, access control, and fire alarms. These protocols enable the exchange of precise data for specific purposes on a localized level but are not intended for communication with third-party systems outside the building throughout its operational phase.
As a result, these buildings lack the necessary “communication skills” to exchange information and collaborate with other city stakeholders on a more abstract level.
This creates a disconnect between the capabilities of smart building technology and the current state of the buildings themselves. The lack of openness and interoperability between systems within buildings and those outside of the building limits the potential of smart building technology in achieving more efficient use of resources and improved experience for building and city occupants. In essence, having interconnected buildings would elevate efficiency and usage.
