Smart Buildings == Context aware buildings?

Will the smart buildings be aware of what is going on with the occupants, should it? For example, should it know, what they are doing, what their preferences are?

Contextual and Situational awareness are key technical pillars of a smart building. Situational awareness is more about the perception and understanding of environmental elements, both internal and external to the building. While it is not phrased as “situational awareness”, most of the smart building solutions today include aspects of situational awareness, they are mostly targeted solutions within silos like lighting, HVAC, security etc. While there is long way to go, the existing solutions have made progress towards “situational awareness”. However, the emphasis on engaging the building occupants (beyond facility professionals) has been minimal to nonexistent.

Context awareness by definition is the state of the user (occupants of a building), like, where they are, what they are doing, and what they are interacting with etc. Given that the objectives of a smart building includes occupant comfort, efficient operation, resource optimization (energy, water) etc, then engaging the occupants becomes critical and an effective strategy. It allows the building system to react in a more meaningful manner, in-situ, and maximize its chances of effectively achieving its objectives.

Let’s take a simple and well established example of how lighting works. There are occupancy sensors that detects movement and switches the light ON, the system times out after a few minutes and switches the lights OFF. This action remains the same in all situations, be it an occupant walking past that area, or actively working in that space. Let’s see how context awareness helps. If the system understands the activity of the occupant, it can adjust the timeout automatically when he is just passing by, more interestingly it can optimize the amount of lighting based on activity. It can go even further if it understands the occupants lighting preference and adjust accordingly. This can expand to other building automation areas as well.

Wait … we are not done. There is still one pillar where the building starts interacting to the users, providing them feedback, even condemning resource wastage. I am going to leave those musings to the next blog.

Zan Compute (Smart Solution for Smarter Facilities) www.zancompute.com

Breaking the Silos in Building IOT

Today’s building automation systems are silos, using their own sensors and controls. Why should an occupancy sensor in a room help control only the lights? One of the major advantages of having intelligent sensors is their ability to talk to each other. Are we using this capability intelligently to optimize all the systems in the building? Today, the clear answer is no.

Today’s buildings have quite a few systems in place for specific purposes.  HVAC systems control heating and cooling various zones in the building using thermal sensors, lighting control systems turn the lights on and off based on occupancy sensors, smart meters inform you of day by day or minute by minute energy usage and  timers turn on watering systems. We have seen sensors that can be connected to water meters and watch for spikes, send an alert about a possible leak in the house or facility. 

What if these systems can also talk to each other, and help optimize the building as a whole? Can we break the silos in building automation systems by adding intelligent sensors that can talk to each other? What could possibly be the impact of such collaboration? Some questions that could be answered are:

Why is suddenly hot water usage in the dorm going up- could it be because the room temperature is down around the time when most occupants take a shower? Why is the heat on when the occupancy driven lights are off in the room- should it be also turned off? How can we use totally uncharacteristic use of water, lights or heat to detect security breaches?

Zan compute, with our internet connected sensors and machine learning back-end system, can easily adopt our solutions across the silos in Building IOT. When our solutions for custodial services, HVAC, water usages and other facility management tasks are all implemented in a building, we can use the intelligence and the fusion of the data to solve the problems stated above and much more.

Transformation of Custodial Service, a necessity?

There is about 87.4 billion sq ft of commercial space in the US which requires the attention of custodial service providers every day. That number is rapidly growing as new construction increases. Today the custodial staff have to walk around and check garbage bins, paper rolls in that space even if that doesn’t require their attention. If an individual covers approximately 2.5 sq ft / stride, the collective steps by the American custodial staff is about 33.6 Billion. The part where it becomes interesting is the cost, the average labor cost is about $0.10 / sq ft / month, which is again a constantly changing number (as wages increase). So a very simple calculation reveals that for every step taken by a custodial staff the building owner pays $0.25. Hence the collective strides of the custodial staff adds up to 10s of Billions of dollars.

At ZAN Compute our view is that automation is inevitable in this space. The transformation to an on demand cleaning is critical, and we have a solution that does exactly that.

Our patent pending Smart Facility Management Platform (SFMP) combines the power of wireless sensor and data analysis. The solution includes, sensors in regular objects like garbage cans, toilet papers, and towel dispensers etc, sending realtime data to a cloud platform. ZAN cloud platform aggregate, fuse and synthesize the data to provide an on-demand schedule and alerts, that will allow facility managers to greatly optimize the custodial process.

Visit us at www.zancompute.com