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