Smart buildings for a smart city
For nearly 2 years, I spent time traveling from city to city and from conference to conference looking for a magical blueprint for building smart cities for my clients. I discovered that communities trying to develop smart cities faced many obstacles, confusion, and limited attempts with few wins. Trying to define smart city was a challenge and each city had widely differing definitions.
Many cities thought free public Wi-Fi and smart lighting were the starting points, but once the vendor-sponsored first few city blocks of smart lighting were completed and city spending priorities were elsewhere, these projects stalled. What I began to recognize was that the path to a smart city began with the buildings themselves and I penned the article The Smart Way to Smart Cities Begins with Buildings.
City leaders and city planners have struggled for years to balance their desire for smart cities with the many other needs of their communities. Clearly, building a smart city will help them resolve some of their challenges, such as improving government services, quality of life, energy efficiency, cost reduction, and sustainability, to name a few. These must be balanced with other pressing issues, such as homelessness, urban growth, resource requirements, and decaying infrastructures. Challenges have resulted in limited smart city projects to date and vendor-sponsored initiatives that, while achieving desired outcomes such as smart lighting, typically only cover small sections of the city, and funds would be required to extend these initiatives to the rest of the city.
Smart buildings offer an opportunity for every city to achieve its goals. Self-managed smart buildings can quickly grow into smart campuses and then smart communities by connecting and sharing services. This scalability can be integrated with the city’s smart city objectives.
Whether buildings serve as schools, hospitals, or offices or medical, hospitality, residential, or industrial purposes, they are in essence small cities unto themselves delivering the same infrastructural functions as cities do. Safety, security, energy, utilities, lighting, communications, ventilation, sanitation, and parking are just a few of the similarities. When these functions are made smart in a building, they can help a city transition similar functions to smart to build a smart city. Basically, a building is a microcosm of a city; therefore, a smart building is a microcosm of a smart city. Connecting smart buildings together can build a smart city foundation.
Buildings and cities must work together to achieve mutual goals. Energy is one of the biggest opportunities and as smart buildings become more energy efficient, they may also be able to give back to the city’s energy grid. IoT sensors and connectivity with the grid make buildings more responsive to grid conditions to reduce stress and improve reliability by cutting energy consumption during high-demand periods. Grid-responsive equipment such as water heaters turn on and off in response to the utility’s peak demand. Buildings can also collect and store energy with solar panels and batteries.
By collecting and analyzing data, safety and security is another area where smart buildings can help build smart cities. With building-mounted cameras and IoT sensors such as gunshot and occupancy sensors, information can be shared with the city’s integrated control center. Suspicious activity observation, traffic management, and crowd control can all be managed centrally. Analytics and machine learning can leverage historical data to predict situations and trigger alarms if needed.
Smart city emergency response starts with smart building information. Police, firefighters, emergency medical responders, and other first responders can access digital information about a building, such as floor plans, what chemicals might be stored there, and what building systems are in use. In the case of a building fire, remote access and control of the building’s management, HVAC, and fire suppression systems can ensure that the proper amount of air is supplied or cut off as needed to manage the fire while the first responders are en route. Video cameras and motion sensors can provide valuable insights and information prior to arrival so they know what to prepare for and what to prioritize. Real-time information regarding the situation can be transmitted directly to hospitals, police, and firefighter support teams.
A building is a physical asset that, when enabled with IoT sensors and software, transforms into a smart asset managing its internal systems more efficiently. These smart assets connected to other smart assets and smart systems become part of the larger city ecosystem. Smart buildings are an important part as they provide a variety of network connectivity options while serving as a platform for other sensors and devices that can capture, share, and communicate with each other. For example, smart buildings can be linked to police departments via IP-connected video and to on-street parking via sensors, as well as to smart outdoor lighting systems, and all of these can function together to provide a responsive and safe environment for residents, businesses, and visitors.
Many of the buildings within a city are government-owned and managed buildings such as courthouses, libraries, fire stations, police stations, schools, community colleges, and others that make up the city’s infrastructure. To build a smart city with smart buildings, it makes sense to incorporate smart requirements into these publicly funded buildings, such as mobility, healthcare, security, lighting, environment, energy, construction, and communications requirements.
Data is collected from almost every smart device and sensor located in, on, or around a building. Public data and information from smart buildings combined with data collected by the government and other sources can be analyzed to solve city problems and make improvements. While, to many, data gathering feels like a privacy invasion, it has become an integral part of life. Experts around the world are constantly creating new solutions and programs to reduce the risk of data breaches. Government entities along with industries are creating privacy guidelines such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe.