Q19714: The subject of “Information Systems for Managers” has impacted you so positive that you decide to convert your own house/building/apartment into a Smart Building. Suggest five innovative solutions towards a Smart Building & enlist their benefits for yourself and your neighborhood.
ANSWER:
Introduction: In the modern world, smart buildings integrate technology and the IoT to provide solutions to the old issues of overspend and inefficiency in building construction and use. Implementation of a smart building connects all the systems from air conditioning to security and lighting. In addition to that usage of sensors, such as occupancy and people counters, actionable data about how the buildings are really used can be gathered to enable it to perform better. As per the given statement in the question, I decide to convert my own house/building/apartment into a Smart Building. I have to suggest five innovative solutions towards a Smart Building & enlist their benefits for myself and my neighbourhood.
Concept & Application:
Innovative solutions towards a Smart Building: Innovative solutions in buildings can be used in different ways in different types of buildings. For instance, smart official buildings might focus on increasing the productivity of employees while a residential building might try to mimic circadian rhythms to achieve optimal comfort for those inside. There can be following different methodologies for implementing smart building technologies:
- Water Supply Systems: These systems can be automated to detect leaks, monitor quality, and automate heating and cooling. Presently, all builders are putting such systems in the new buildings so that it can reduce the maintenance cost and provide better life to the residents.
- Chiller plants: These plants can be optimized to incorporate outside weather data to reduce energy use while cooling the building. Importance is being given to chiller plants in the new buildings because it provides more comfort to the residents.
- Air conditioning and heating systems: These systems can be set up to turn on and off based on the occupancy of a room. It can save lot of energy for the nation and provide lot of saving to individual.
- Electrical Loads: A building’s electrical loads can be categorized and grouped by priority to better understand how critical and non-essential loads are working. As per this analysis, proper planning can be made for the requirement of accurate critical and non-essential loads for the concerned building.
- Connected weather stations: Weather stations can be installed to the outside of buildings to optimize internal systems like temperature and air quality. On the basis of these weather stations, we can plan if there is any requirement for improving the air quality.
- Sensors: These sensors can be used to check for room occupancy and match patterns to energy use throughout the day. Such sensors are helpful in planning the usage of energy in the concerned building.
- Infrastructure: We can add building infrastructure to the cloud for storage and data management. This will be helpful in saving the hardware and software cost for the building owners.
- Internal systems: In the new buildings we can connect multiple internal systemslike lighting, air conditioning, water, and ventilation can be connected to see how they affect each other throughout the day and optimize for efficiency.
- Structural integrity: Integrity can be monitored by tracking how the building responds to ambient vibrations which can be useful for future planning like to take some action for reducing the variations.
- Data collection: This data collection can be used to maintain optimal comfort settings for residents in the building while also reducing waste. These data collection can used for future planning to improve the required services for the residents of the building.
- Remote control: Remote control over systems can reduce the response times for building managers and allow them to address issues in the building from a distance.
Benefits of Smart Buildings:
- Reduce energy consumption: Amounts can vary depending on systems and buildings, but we can reduce the energy consumption in a building by around 5% -40% with the use of smart technology. These are significant financial savings, as well as a much more efficient and effective approach to meeting green goals.
- Improve building efficiency: Innovative sensors provide anonymous data about how the building is being used and this enables smart systems to make adjustments about where heat and light are required. These sensors also help to identify overused and underused areas in the building, providing the opportunity to optimise space utilisation, which in turn can facilitate growth.
- Predictive maintenance: It has been observed that maintenance costs can be substantial when handled manually. Smart buildings enable simpler predictive maintenance. It has been observed that innovative sensors can detect building performance and activate maintenance procedures before an alert is triggered. When we have a more insightful overview of how the building is operating and used it is far easier to implement maintenance at the right time.
- Increase productivity: It has been observed that smart buildings are so designed specifically to deliver a more comfortable experience for their occupants. These innovative tools can raise standards and ensure that health and safety considerations are being met, as well as ensure that this is implemented in a cost-efficient way.
- Better use of resources: We can generate the data from a smart building which provides key insights that can be fed into planning and make use of resources more efficient. Such steps remove the need to rely on guesswork or anecdotal data as this can be informed by real-time, genuine intelligence.
Conclusion: It has been observed that Smart buildings are a key contributor to a future low-carbon economy, where information system and smart building applications will combine and merge perfectly. Analysts agree that smart building applications need to be hardware system conscious. It is a fact that smart building applications will require multi-layer software/hardware adaptability to achieve both high quality of service and energy/cost reduction. We may need significant improvement in new hardware solutions, understanding the whole system problem, and joint consideration. Innovated techniques also play a key role in the energy consumption and quality of service of smart buildings and software is the interface between information hardware layer and smart application layer.