Report: Next Generation Building Automatic and Control – IoT applications

Today, as a part of responsibilities of facility and service managers, in order to anticipate fails, regularly our FM staff perform routines and move through the facilities of the building. They taken several hours to fill checklist (paper or mobile device checklist) about actual state of some installations or devices, like:

– Verify content status of our paper dispensers and liquid soap dispensers
– Verify content status of trash cans
– Check if our printer toner is still full
– If we need more chairs for a meeting? Inspect to look for available chairs in other meeting room
– Keep permanent monitoring of security cameras so that we can see suspect people which are walking through restricted places
– Verify all windows are closed in a room with HVAC
– In order to prevent any loss of electric isolation, we should check each outlet into a floor to verify their correct voltage
– Verify if all extinguishers are in their right place.

What if we avoid those routines with our staff? How many man-hours could we save? What if we let that these devices indicate us what is happening with them? You’ve heard about the future of smart buildings? In the future, devices will interact with other similar devices over the internet to help us to achieve operational efficiencies, they will ‘tell us’ what they need, their state, their actual requirements.

A few weeks ago I found an interesting video of Tyréns AB (see web): a Swedish company that provides professional engineering services and IT services and project management. In this video we can see procedures of installation of more than 1000 sensors of all types (with the new system IPv6 addressing) attached to the most installations of their building in Stockholm, in order to test the speed of their internet access points to capture that great amount of signals.

Because its true, with this new way of managing the buildings, we have to improve our ability to handle millions and billions of new internet signals, applying the concept of IoT – internet of things. Of course, all test was performed into BIM modeling environment (see Tyréns video)

For these reasons, in the near future we will take our data more easily, in most cases in real time. So, we must to improve analysis methodology and our ability of manage a great amount of data and sources. Other opportunity to prove our multi-task ability.