What are "smart" buildings?
The last few years have brought a profound change in the workspace, and the advantages of smart buildings are increasingly attracting the attention of the business environment, through the perspective of increasing staff productivity, increased safety measures in the context of the pandemic, energy efficiency, cost reduction of operation and optimization of the use of buildings.
"Smart" buildings are digitally interconnected structures that combine optimized construction and operational automation with intelligent space management to provide a more pleasant user experience, increase productivity, and reduce physical and cyber security costs.
The intelligent building also involves "smart" services, based on technology, which keep it within the designed parameters: utility and energy management, monitoring of automation systems, predictive maintenance, security, user experience and, last but not least, aspects related to sanitary safety.
If we were to see what the similarities are between "smart" buildings and "smart" cities, we can think of everything that digitized parking lots and intelligent traffic lights mean. In a similar way, within intelligent buildings a logical and proximity-based grouping of intelligent elements is attempted. At their core, smart buildings are digitally connected structures that combine space optimization and operational automation through intelligent space management to improve user experience, increase productivity, reduce costs and address cybersecurity risks.
Smart buildings are found in all industries, from office buildings, to factories, malls, hospitals, campuses, stadiums, airports, military bases and residential buildings. The red thread is the human, because these spaces are dedicated to interaction activities, collaboration through the use of the latest technology, through which people can carry out their work and benefit from a special digital experience.
By definition, smart buildings involve the use of technology
"Smart" buildings are based on physical objects and digital technology; from the intersection of the two, connected and efficient spaces are born. By definition, smart buildings involve the use of technology.
The advent of advanced technologies has enabled a new generation of digital capabilities and services to emerge in office buildings, factories, retail establishments and more. A number of key technologies have created the foundation of smart buildings, including IoT, cloud infrastructure, data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
La fel de importantă este convergentă a două domenii importante în cadrul clădirilor smart: IT și operațiuni. Din ce în ce mai mult, infrastructura IT care alimentează birourile digitale bazată pe informații devine, de asemenea, o bază fundamentală pentru automatizarea clădirilor conectate, pentru securitatea cibernetică a clădirii și alte aspecte operaționale ale clădirii în sine. O strategie de construcție inteligentă ar trebui să includă toate aspectele tehnologiei, care pot fi grupate în trei categorii: fizic, digital și servicii.
Abordarea în implementarea tehnologiilor pentru clădirile smart
Given the opportunities involved in leveraging smart buildings to drive staff engagement, cost savings, energy efficiency and more, many business leaders are eager to adopt smart building technologies. However, it is important to strategize around smart buildings to avoid some of the common pitfalls that many of these individual efforts produce. An effective strategy must define a holistic set of requirements that cover functional areas such as IT, operations, human resources, corporate real estate and security.
The team of key stakeholders should also be identified based on these requirements in order to set realistic timeframes and make the right investments in proof of concept and large-scale implementations. All of these can be essential to get the most out of smart buildings.