What do developers want from smart buildings and the contractors building them?

Those were the key topics addressed in a developers’ panel debate, featuring representatives from British Land and Landsec, at the Smart Buildings Show this week.

Chaired by Kevin Browmell, smart building director at NuXform, the panel comprised:

The debate started with Browmell asking the panel for their definition of a smart building.

James Thomas I think of it as a digital ecosystem where we gather and aggregate data from the building’s systems that we install for another purpose – such as the VMS or the lighting – and we combine that with data from IoT sensors to deliver a data-driven approach that can effectively link other parts of our business to the whole lifecycle of the asset.

Ravi Lakhani A smart building is one that inspires people to want to be there, that integrates all of the technologies and uses them to do something a little bit more new, to build a little bit better so, to provide increased wellbeing in a building, to make people feel more comfortable, to make people never feel lost in that space. All of these technologies exist, and being able to join them together effectively is what gives us the workplaces of the future.

Damien Renaut A smart building is about applying technologies to improve the way a building works, meaning improving the user experience, improving sustainability, improving product effectiveness, and really making sure that the technology that we put in buildings has a return on investment, not only for the occupiers, but also for the landlord.

Linden Stephens A smart building is when all assets in the building are self-describing. We didn’t have that before in BMS systems, they just spoke to the head-end and they gave us the run-time data.

The contextual information around assets is important. The boiler tag on a fan cool unit or a pressurisation unit on a set of pumps is important. We need to know what’s in the building and what the basis of the design was and what its capacity is. It’s about bringing that information out of the building somewhere it can be analysed. We want to track the variance on the asset. We want to track the degradation of the asset. We need that information. We want to speed up mean-time to repair. We want to understand mean-time before failure.

How can we make them self-describing? By capturing their metadata and also capturing their run-time data. That way, we can look at that asset, understand that asset and understand what it’s doing in the building. All the other stuff, like user interfaces and things like that, come on top of understanding what systems are in the building, how they’re working, how they’re behaving.

Linden Stephens I think the most important thing is to understand your workflows. Understand what you’re trying to do. First, you want to do data extraction. You want the assets within your building to send you information about themselves. Next, you want to send that data somewhere: you need a data pipeline to send that data. And finally, you need somewhere that you can produce products from that data, possibly in the cloud. You can go to vendors and ask them to do lifecycle management, or fault detection and diagnostics, from the data you send them.

Back in the early days of smart buildings, all data extraction was done by a MSI [master systems integrator]. But as the industry has become more intelligent, we’re finding that some systems can send their data natively. For instance, lighting control. It can tell me about every single lumen, every single LCM: it can tell me what it is, where it was made, and what it’s doing. Therefore, it becomes self-describing, natively: you’re not bringing in somebody else to try to extract data and then trying to send it.

We dictate the data exchange format. We dictate how we send data to the cloud. You need to own your data pipeline.

James Thomas Contractors need to grasp the nuances of delivering smart and intelligent buildings. I think you will see contractors that will excel at it and others that won’t invest in it because of the uncertainty around the adoption of smart buildings. The Digital Buildings Council has a role to play in sharing knowledge about the common approaches to delivering smart assets and smart buildings.

Linden Stephens A digital building contractor thinks about selecting trades that get the smart journey, that will have the software to deliver the data we want.

Damien Renaut The key to delivering smart buildings is there must be someone in the main contractor that drives not only the construction, but also all of the technology that will go into the building.

Ravi Lakhani There is still a big focus in construction around mechanical and electrical systems and the BMS. That means to get the outcomes you want on a project, you become dependent on the commissioning and design of the BMS. Being able to plan for that well in advance of commissioning is one of the things that needs to be owned.

Smart assets are hybrid devices: they live on an [IT] network, but are supported by facilities. You need someone new in a lot of clients who can actually understand what they really want and then instruct the project team to deliver that. And that is missing from a lot of businesses. We don’t have these hybrid stakeholders, so we end up in this blockage of having 20-odd stakeholders to try to make a single decision.

James Thomas I see digital platforms as a way of bridging the gap between construction and operations. One really good example of that is building from all of the wonderful conformity that you have in a BIM model and creating a digital twin. I know digital twins are seen as a little bit of a buzzword in the industry, but we have successfully deployed digital twins. The customers adopt the twin not only to operate and maintain the asset and use it as an effective asset management platform, but also as a building operating system.

One really good example is Linden’s and British Land’s adoption of Facilio and how they use it as their digital twin platform. Our role in that is to aggregate data from the physical assets that we install in the MEP solution and through other smart technology, and present that to the cloud, and then Linden does all of the hard work and the data aggregation and analysis of it using his digital twin platform.

Damien Renaut BIM was never designed to handle live IoT data: it has very limited use in operation. We can use the BIM data better by downloading all of the asset lists and relationships between the assets within the BIM model to feed into the CAFM platform, into your smart building platform, so then you don’t start development from scratch.

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