WASHINGTON – “Internet of Things” technology has a wide range of applications from precision agriculture to a smart city and even a smart building. Like so much with IoT, what a smart building currently lacks is a concrete, widely accepted definition.
The definition most agreed upon by the industry is a building with some degree of automation. That can mean something as simple as self-flushing toilets or as complex as real-time fully integrated sensor systems monitoring the power consumption for each light bulb in the structure.
The principles behind a smart buildings are, to large degree, a scaled-up version of the technologies being touted for smart home systems. This can mean more efficient energy management, better safety features and a more cost-effective approach to facility maintenance.
According to Continental Automated Building Association, a trade group based in Ottawa, Ontario, the Morgan Stanley building in New York City has used smart lighting systems to save $1.28 million on energy.
CABA said in its Life Cycle Costing Report that, “There is a growing emphasis on proving the business case prior to sanctioning any project. Budget curtailments that followed the recessionary conditions post-2007 in North America, and its cascading effect that was felt globally, indirectly exerted a significant push on the adoption levels of these [smart building] techniques. CABA has also published a series of reports, which illustrate that through renewable energy and efficient building management, it is possible to make a building energy neutral. So-called zero net energy structures can produce as much energy as they consume.
Zero net energy and efficient lighting is applicable across commercial, residential, enterprise and multiuse structures in any city in the world, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Efficiently and effectively managing the IoT systems of what is basically a small city can be daunting. It isn’t just private structures comprising this trend – train stations, airports, oil refineries and nuclear power plants also benefit from the efficiency realized by automation. This has created an increased demand for effective data management for the sea of IoT data.
David Doll, a manger for data aggregation firm OSIsoft, which markets the popular PI system, told RCR Wireless News how his firm is helping make the big data generated by big structures more manageable.
“OSI has been around since before there was an Internet,” Doll explained “We used to help oil refineries install sensors on fax and telex systems, but we’ve begun increasingly migrating toward IoT systems.”
Doll said his company doesn’t make IoT systems or the infrastructure they run on, instead it makes the OSIsoft PI system, which “enables you to easily leverage lots of little data into something actionable.”
As firms like Cisco and IBM increasingly migrate toward smart systems including smart structures and smart infrastructure, vendor-neutral companies like OSI are positioning themselves to help end users effectively use the millions of data points IoT systems spit out on a constant basis.
A smart building – whether power plants and other mission-critical infrastructure or single family homes and condo high-rises – is likely to increasingly become a staple of daily life.
