Smart buildings need information management – and those in information management need to understand smart building owners’ and occupiers’ needs, says Richard Saxon CBE.
I have just visited the Smart Buildings Show, at Excel in London. This is a salutary experience for anyone who thinks of buildings as things made of structure and fabric.
The ‘smart’ community sees them as systems of spaces and services, performing under sophisticated controls to deliver wellbeing, convenience and zero carbon emissions. The proportion of capital spend devoted to systems is often about a third, but much more in health and science buildings. Operating and maintenance costs are dominated by them.
The rise of intelligent buildings dates back decades, but is now in overdrive as myriad previously separate systems can be integrated into one building’s nervous system. Artificial intelligence is lifting the concept of automation to the next level. The prospect is now of self-managing, digitally twinned assets that optimise occupier performance while lowering operating cost, carbon and risk of any system failure.
The mobile phone is the gateway to allowing occupiers to book and set up comfortable spaces, find colleagues and order the food and drinks they fancy.
Information connects smart and physical
What the smart set don’t tell you is that the cyber-physical building needs to be based on information management. An information model helps greatly in providing the infrastructure, with its spaces and elements classified and COBie-coded. Facility management can then look at a dashboard that includes the ability to locate every element, as well as providing the golden thread of information about how it is made, by whom and with what maintenance regime.
Smart buildings need a master system integrator to put all the once-freestanding systems together and potentially link them to the occupier’s and landlord’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Lead appointed parties in the design and construction stages need to be aware of this burgeoning dimension to information management.
Richard Saxon CBE is director of services to clients at Deploi: information management for the built environment.
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