The building of tomorrow will be smart, intuitive, efficient and connected

The summer universities of the Smart Building Alliance (SBA) were held in Lyon - FRANCE on the 30th and 31st of August.  This was an opportunity for all the stakeholders of the alliance to meet and address the trends in Smart Buildings and Smart Cities.  The meeting confirmed that today, a building must be more efficient, in terms of ecological imperatives on the one hand and economic ones on the other hand. It also confirmed that humans must be the focus of the solutions.  Technology, although imperative, should not be the goal, but rather a means of providing more and more services to the building’s stakeholders who are the users of the technology.

Energy efficiency requires that occupants of the building manage their consumption in order to limit the impact on the environment. However, this change must not be to the detriment of services provided to them.  Habits, behaviors and expectations evolve over time. Autonomous users want to be informed and supported with technology that in addition to being intelligent, must now be intuitive and dynamic, allowing a natural interaction with its users.

Many questions then arise:

- How to make a building intelligent and intuitive for all users?
- How to make a building more efficient while optimizing operational and maintenance costs?
- How to manage the increasing volume of building data, especially in terms of security?
- How to translate this data into relevant information for an increasingly mobile user?
Current technology, notably mobile and geo-localization, and connected objects offer new opportunities for the implementation of a variety of relevant solutions. Contextual mobility is a concrete example. It consists of exchanging and displaying relevant and contextual information in an intuitive and secure way on a mobile device with a single application. Applied in a building, it becomes an extension of it and makes the building dynamic, allowing direct and intuitive interaction with the user.

The mobile application SnapVue developed by PcVueSolutions, for example, automatically provides the information of the devices near the mobile user and allows certain actions according to their role. Examples of applications are numerous and add value to various systems including BMS, Facility Management, Access control and CMMS.  In each case it is providing mobile services such as contextual information, archiving of asset positions, notification of alarms, exchange of messages between users, retrieval of the list of users in specific areas and many others. 

The building is providing comfort and efficiency services for its users. With SnapVue an operator can be informed in real time and automatically, according to their position and level of responsibility.  For example, the user may be informed of the current power of a boiler, have ready access to the associated technical documents and even modify the target set point, all from their smartphone without having to navigate a menu. Thus, the building becomes pro-active by automatically providing the right information, in the right place, to the right person at the right time.

The building must also be connected. It should not be seen as isolated but as part of a set of interoperable buildings, a neighborhood or a smart city. Efficient buildings will produce more energy than they consume.  Connected to the Smart Grid, they can power it in the same way as solar panels, wind turbines or hydroelectric power plants.In this context, an open platform such as PcVue which is capable of hypervising buildings, substations or power plants is at the heart of the convergence of Smart Building, Smart City and Smart Grid.

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