Skanska UK has redeveloped and improved the smart building platform it first deployed on its City of London HQ a few years ago and is now offering it to customers. But it’s not just for smart building operation, as Tom Gould, operational efficiency director for building at Skanska, reveals.
During 2020, Skanska UK developed a smart building platform, which it deployed at its head office, 51 Moorgate, in the City of London. The platform collects and analyses real-time data to improve building performance, focusing on carbon and operational efficiency and productivity.
Skanska entered the platform into the Digital Construction Awards 2022. Its entry declared that since introducing the platform at 51 Moorgate, the building’s energy consumption was cut by more than 40%, and there was an 8% reduction in FM resource on site.
It was an impressive set of results that gave Skanska the confidence to go to market and offer the platform to customers. However, the team identified that there was an opportunity to update some of the platform’s underlying technology, having had it in operation for a couple of years.
“We’re very much focused on the holistic building performance at the moment. Intellekt is modular, so you can have as much or as little as you like.”
The updated platform, known as Intellekt, has replaced the original iteration at 51 Moorgate. “We’ve also provided it to the tenant who has taken the building’s upper floors,” Gould tells BIMplus.
“The system is now far more agnostic: it can work with different integration platforms at an edge computing level in a building, and with any sensor vendor.”
Indeed, at 51 Moorgate, the platform is connected to 140 IoT sensors on the Skanska floors and another 180 on the upper floors. As well as the IoT sensors, the platform is connected to more than 2,200 assets “that we either monitor or bi-directionally control”.
Rules engine for dynamic operation
The arrival of the new tenants at Moorgate changed the dynamics of the building and gave Skanska a fresh learning opportunity. “Before, we were running a couple of floors, plus the basement; the other floors, we were just running static. Now we’ve got a fully occupied building with different occupancies at different times because the upper floors are a flexible working space. Some weeks you might have lots of people in there, some weeks you might have not many at all. We’re able to use the platform’s rules engine to create that dynamic building operation.”
Skanska expects that rules engine to deliver further savings over and above those generated by the platform’s first iteration. Gould explains: “We’re hoping to achieve further savings because the rules engine in the new platform is far more intuitive. Users at the front end can build their own algorithms, their own ‘if’ statements – ‘if this, do that’. They can apply as many statements as they wish with as many data points as they like. Previously, this capability was in the back-end and you would have had to ask us to build those algorithms in the back-end for you.”
Holistic building performance
The rules engine is just one example of the platform’s improved user interface. Another is that the alerts engine not only includes the standard alerts from the BMS, but allows the user to create their own customised alerts.
“We’re very much focused on the holistic building performance at the moment,” Gould emphasises. “Intellekt is modular, so you can have as much or as little as you like. You don’t have to have the 3D model, you don’t have to have the digital twin, you could just deploy sensors.
“Of course, we want to provide it as the platform and our insights service [Skanska experts who analyse a building’s data and make recommendations to customers to improve the building performance] – that’s our differentiator from the competitors in the market. Having said that, we do appreciate that some organisations will have their own people who are building performance experts, who can also work with us within the platform for building operation.”
Use cases now and in the future
Gould muses on Intellekt’s many use cases: “There are three potential users of the platform: developers or landlords, tenants or the occupiers of a space, and the FM teams. The landlord might subscribe to Intellekt purely to understand energy consumption by floor. But if a floor is sublet, the tenant might want to be able to control the assets on that floor. With Intellekt, they can do that.
“Intellekt has the capacity to grow into the performance digital twin for construction. It can understand our performance on projects in real-time for people, plant and material.”
“Then you might have an FM team come into the building that wants to use the platform purely for condition-based maintenance, where we might deploy sensors for vibration, noise or leak detection. There are lots of different use cases. And if a new tenant means a new or replacement fit-out, you can import the new fit-out model into the system.”
Gould and Skanska are not sitting on their laurels: they believe there are other ways to deploy Intellekt. “It was designed for the operation of a building, but we’re exploring how it could be used in construction. We’re looking to deploy IoT sensors across our sites for noise, dust and vibration and thus be able to monitor performance. We’re looking at tracking the energy consumption of our site cabins and our sites, which means we can predict more accurate energy consumption for future projects based on the energy that we actually use,” he says.
Another future direction is the monitoring of people and equipment with a view to safety and productivity. Gould concludes: “Intellekt has the capacity to grow into what I want to call the performance digital twin for construction. It can understand our performance on projects in real-time from sensor technology for people, plant and material. Watch this space.”
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