Smart Building.. Don't Go Dumb!

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Innovative firms and jobs creation

In this post, we are going to investigate how job are going to be redesigned in the light of smart buildings. We will take some focal firms leaders in the sector and dig into their innovative functions as well as new technical profiles needed by innovating firms that want to compete effectively in the new workspace.

Honeywell International

Honeywell International, Inc. is an American multinational conglomerate company that produces a variety of commercial and consumer products, engineering services and aerospace systems for a wide variety of customers, from private consumers to major corporations and governments. The company operates three business units, known as a Strategic Business Unit–Aerospace, Automation and Control Solutions (ACS), and Performance Materials and Technologies (PMT).

Honeywell Building Solutions

Honeywell Building Solutions (HBS) products and services provide energy efficiency and security in buildings and communities. Smart grid, microgrid and on-site power generation, integrated security, building controls, automation, and management, system service, maintenance and optimization, and smart building are examples of the technologies produced by the HBS business unit. HBS optimizes automation technology, designs and delivers microgrids that provide energy security, and delivers demand response and energy-efficiency programs to help utilities and the electrical grid operate optimally.

  Smart building Design

Smart building Design  is an Italian company of architecture and engineering that works in renewable energy and sustainable architecture.

They provide services for all the phases of construction industry: design, construction, operation and maintenance.

There are some specific services as thermomechanical project development or energetic diagnosis for example, which need new kind of high skilled professionals, which in this case will mean to have a partnership with a laboratory or in the other hand, the installation of wind turbines that requires specialized technicians.

So now, you can start to imagine how broad the field of construction has become!

New job profiles

Smart building IoT

And now let’s have a look to the new job profiles!

Information security guard

The information security technician is responsible for the protection of the network connection that the smart devices in a building are using for communication. The Cisco's 2014 Security Report estimates that 1 million security professionals are needed to meet today's demand. Current reports showed that an average of approximately 300,000 cybersecurity professionals are needed to protect the smart buildings today.

The smart Installer

It is the new professional figure born from the convergence between the world of installation, domotics, design and building construction. The process of digitalization of residential buildings led to the integration between electric and electronic installer. He is a digital counselor whose competences are transversal in order to integrate the devices in the houses. Besides having the basic technical skills of an installer of broadcasting systems, antennas and electronic installations, he has advanced skills in terms of home automation and is able to support in terms of technological infrastructure the design of a new building from the early stages.

Smart Building Consultant:

It is a professional person that provide building services design management and client relationship management to large retail/commercial/leisure/residential real estate and master planning developments. The Smart Building Consultant explores solutions and future trends with industry leaders and technology providers to achieve the client's project goals.

BAS  - Building Automation System Specialist

It serves as regional Project Manager for the smart buildings implementation and BAS migration projects. It develops projects to improve and validate existing HVAC systems, Building Automation  Systems,  Advance Metering Systems, and Lighting Systems. Reviews, comments, and makes recommendations involving mechanical drawings specifically dealing with HVAC systems and the aforementioned projects. Prioritizes projects and coordinates work assignments with other Regional specialists, engineers, and customer service center  building managers.

Smart Hands Technician

 It assists with new MPLS (Multi Protocol Label Switching) physical connectivity and activation. It verifies the physical location of network equipment. It labels wall ports and patch panel (as required or directed). Moreover, it re-terminates and certify existing cabling (if required).

Smart Systems Discipline Leader

As the Smart Systems Discipline Leader, you will reside in the COE (Center of Excellence) and work with Program Managers to ensure the required capabilities are in place and drive excellence into the Smart Systems aspect of each program. The smart systems discipline leader is accountable for all functional, business, and broad company objectives for this sub-program. This role will require focus on applications to make systems cleaner, safer, better, cheaper, faster and smarter to optimize the important role of oil and gas in the broad energy system.

Landscape of the future

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Caged in the value chain

The creation of new technologies has caused remarkable changes in the way businesses and companies work nowadays;

In this article, you will find the way in which the enabling technologies that allow the design, construction, operation and maintainance of smart buildings have influenced the construction industry.

In this way, what jobs were created and which ones were eliminated? Where are they located?

In order to understand this evolution process we will explain the value chain of the construction industry and how it has been re-shaped.

“The value chain describes the full range of activities that firms and workers do to bring a product from its conception to its end use and beyond”.

Value chain changes during the penetration of new disruptive technology.

Starting from the inbound logistic and procurement a construction firm needs not only to manage the logistic of traditional material but also of technological ones such as new devices involved in IoT and machine learning. Under a human resource management firms need to care about the training of personnel about technology unknown and far from what they were used to.

Another problem in the first step of new value chain is related to timeliness of procurement. If before the frequency of purchasing was low and firms could store material according to their needs (concrete is always going to be concrete!), now the continuous technological change and the dynamism of IoT industry forces them to acquire most frequently the components related to smart building to catch up with upcomings in this field.

In the crucial step of Operation new categories of issues are now at stake: the introduction of digital devices is considered from the initial design phase at the same time of technical subsystem. The firm need to have some specific profile within its design team able to face the integration of software and devices in the traditional design of a building.

Quality assessment is now a bigger deal than before! Again a new technical profile is needed to assess whether the functionalities installed in the construction site follow the existing, and always changing, protocols (way far from the competencies usually required!) and are actually functioning.

Even though the outbound logistic is not heavily influenced by the transition to smart building, marketing and sales is changing dramatically. Be careful! Given that the target market is changing toward people more and more interested in “smart”  characteristics of the building rather than on the traditional ones, a new market segmentation is needed to deliver the value more accurately. Marketing will get more customized and relationship with buyers more personal.  Another challenge for you is to train the salesforce accordingly with the new and different advantages of their product; remember also to recruit better qualified sales personnel to achieve better performances in service positioning and image!!

Finally, post-sale services almost absent in the traditional business model will see and increase due to the nature itself of smart buildings. In this field things will change dramatically mostly because of the adoption of machine learning technology, as pointed out in our previous post  the practice of predictive maintenance has an huge impact.

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Siemens, also contributing to smart building!

One of the companies that develops different technologies to use in smart buildings is Siemens. For example, one of the technologies developed by this company directly connected to the topic of our blog is the Desigo CC system used for building management. Through this system, it is possible to control and optimize some of the components of your building as heating, ventilation, air conditioning, lighting, shading, and fire safety and so on.

In order to develop this kind of technologies, Siemens has developed an entire entrance for job opportunities and carrier in which they explain all the operating areas and the carries in which they are interested. To be specific, this company is interested in workers that could contribute to six main areas: Engineering, Manufacturing, Research and Development, Information Technology, Sales and Marketing and Supporting Functions.

People who wants to contribute with their knowledge in Siemens for the smart building sector must be have some experience in:

·         Software development and maintenance

·         System administration

·         System design, prototyping and testing

·         Production processes

·         System Integration and Commissioning

Do you want to know a little bit more about Desigo CC system?  

Take a look at this video:

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Smart buildings... smart applications

Iot in commercial buildings

Hi guys! 

Here you are, a little glance on the application of IoT in commercial buildings. Are you curious to see more? 

Click here!!

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Smart Building… Is this concept clear for you?

What is smart building?

Many people is talking about smart building and how cool and convenient is having these kind of settlements in your daily life, but we can ask ourselves… are they really talking about a smart building or are they just talking about a building which has been automated?

It is common to find a bit of confusion in this entire “smart” concept. People tends to think that having the control of their home devices is having a smart building; like thinking that achieving to turn off the lights from your smartphone or being able to turn on your air conditioning before you arrive home. In fact, this is just building automation, a part of a bigger system ….

So at this point you may ask yourself, well… if that is not smart building, what is it then? Let us show you an example. You and your friends want to have this party on a cold winter but you are worried because sometimes your house tends to be very warm and you need to lower the temperature manually or from your phone continuously. If you had a smart building your settlement would be equipped with some sensors that measures the actual temperature, then the central system will compare this value with the comfort temperature and finally a signal will be send to your heater in order to decrease the temperature.

So it is clear, YOU don’t take care of these issues, but it goes furthers; there is a system measuring, controlling and learning patterns to improve the experience of use of a hospital, a school or a residential building, bringing benefits in efficiency, safety and of course, comfort.

How is this possible? Through enabling technologies that have helped to develop different devices that nowadays can perform this kind of actions.

If you are wondering how these kind of system works, which devices you can use, which benefits can they bring to you, how can you measure those benefits and so on do not worry! We are going to provide all this information to you in our posts. The only thing that you have to do is scroll this blog and enjoy. Stay tuned and do not forget to follow us!!!

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Still confused about what internet of things (IoT) is?

Hello everyone!!

Maybe you are still not familiar with the term Internet of Things! 

One of our bloggers found this amazing video from IBM Think Accademy channel in youtube which can help you to understand better what is IoT about in a general sense!

Take a look!!!

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Measuring the benefits of having smart buildings

Hi guys!! 

We already presented some specific benefits of each enabling technology. 

One of our bloggers decided to make a summary to present these benefits to you! Also, in this summary chart you will be able to understand  how you can measure their effectiveness using some indicatoros. Take a look!

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Enabling technologies: Episode 3

Hello again!

With this post we finish our first series of useful information for smart building lovers! Hope it can be useful for you and don’t forget to subscribe! 

Cloud computing

How cloud computing can help an enterprise

What is it?

Another enabling technology usually used in smart building field is cloud computing. This service can be defined as the delivery of computing services over the internet. For example, when you store your information in Dropbox instead of storing it in the hard drive of your computer, you are using a cloud computing service.

When you use cloud computing in smart building you are using the cloud to store the data received from the different devices (for example sensors). Once the information is recorded, your software can analyze it and provide a solution to different situations.  For instance, following the hours in which most of people are present in their houses, the software is able to control the temperature in order to warm environments only in the hours in which people are present in the building.

The benefits of this kind of technology is the possibility to protect your data in case of technical problems, the possibility to access your system information from other locations, the robustness of the storage capacity but also the effectiveness of data protection.

Even though we have these benefits, there can be also negative aspects of having these kind of systems. It can happen that your investors do not feel safe investing in these technologies given that they do not trust in the security of this tool. For example, they can feel threatened by hackers that could steal information from the database in the cloud but also the interruption of the system operation.

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Enabling technologies: episode 2

Welcome back!!

This time we are going to introduce another enabling technology that can be useful for YOU. Stay tuned!

Learning machines

What is it?

 Arthur Samuel defines machine learning as “the field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed”. This is a core issue for smart building as its main goal is to suit the occupants’ needs.

Using machine learning in Building Management System allows making a reactive and even anticipatory real-time alteration to the building environment to adopt it to its occupants’ requirements.

So how to have a real-time control of the building? Using algorithms of machine learning is possible to go beyond the data analysis and computation to approach actual decision making and performance enhancement without being specifically programmed. This technology focuses on the development of computer programs that can teach themselves to grow and change when exposed to new data. This possibility is suitable to be applied in the smart building industry considering the continuous harvesting of changing data concerning the habits of tenants.

For instance HVAC system could learn how rooms or zone within a smart building infrastructure reacts to external temperature, along with the behaviour of users, and create temperature profile for each zone managing heating flows to that area more efficiently and effectively.

Another key concept of smart building that can be enabled by machine learning is the integration of all IT devices and sensors running through the building. The major benefit is allowing facility managers to collect data in the most comprehensive way about energy cost to obtain a reduction of peak demand.

 For now we have finished, wait for our next episode!

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Enabling technologies: Episode 1

Hello again!

If you read some of our post, we mentioned that smart building uses some sort of tools that enables the control and management of a building or a system of buildings. We are going to start a series of posts regarding to some key enabling technologies that nowadays are being used in order to have a smart building. You can find their benefits, but also their impacts through some indicators that measure the benefit they bring to stakeholders.

Let’s start with the IoT technology.

 Internet of Things

Internet of Things

What is it?

The Internet of Things is the network of physical objects—devices, vehicles, buildings and other items—embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity that enables these objects to collect and exchange data. The IoT allows objects to be sensed and controlled remotely across existing network infrastructure, creating opportunities for more direct integration of the physical world into computer-based systems, and resulting in improved efficiency, accuracy and economic benefit. Each thing is uniquely identifiable through its embedded computing system but is able to interoperate within the existing Internet infrastructure.

Benefits

The benefits are achieved thanks to the integration and combination among: HVAC facilities optimization; security and video control; lighting control and improvement of renewable energy sources.

In particular:

HVAC facilities optimization:

Delivers powerful control, day in and day out; Programmability to a wide variety of equipment types; Higher compatibility with existing sensors: Brings in outdoor air to naturally lower a building's interior temperature; Integrates with CO2 sensors to provide demand control ventilation capabilities; delivers continuous messages, important diagnostics and system status. These particular devices can be divided in three main groups:

·         HVAC Controllers

·         Economizers

·         Sensors

Security and video control: state-of-the-art access control and intrusion detection; Record, search and transmit video, audio and data transactions; monitoring and post-event playback operation. These particular devices can be divided in three main categories:

·         Security Readers and Keypads

·         Security Cameras

·         Security Video Recorders

Lighting control:  Integration of lighting control into a building energy management system; Standalone lighting control network or integrate with HVAC, security, video or other building automation systems; lighting control strategies for energy savings; zoned lighting control; smart scheduling. These particular devices can be divided in two main types:

·         Occupancy sensors

·         Wall models

Renewable energy improvement: Performance monitoring to measure energy usage before and after implementing an energy-savings plan; Monitor main circuits to determine where energy is being used; Track tenant consumption for billing purposes; Cost allocation to monitor multiple points in a building to divide utility bills based on department consumption; Work with a variety of building automation systems; Manage small-to-large building HVAC automation systems from a single interface; Manage remotely through an Internet connection

·         Energy meters

·         Web Building Manager

Impacts for stakeholders

Building managers: By collecting and analyzing sensor data, it is possible to have an integrated and more comprehensive visualization of information, faster and more precise decisions making process.

Property owners and managers of small and medium sized buildings: higher awareness of significant cost savings and efficiency gains from building automation.

Tenants: higher comfort of the living spaces, home safety, time saving of everyday tasks and reduced time for notification and resolution of domestic failures.

Community: lower pollution and higher environmental quality level thanks to reduced amount of carbon dioxide and other carbon compounds generated by HVAC facilities of buildings.

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Have you ever heard about smart buildings? Maybe yes..!! If you are not sure, let us ask you a question...What if you could have a software that could be able to control your building using different tools to have energy savings, reduce operating costs and a enables you to have a better performance? This blog can help you to understand how can you achieve this! Take a sneak peak of some of the topics that we are going to talk about in our posts! Wait for it!