Category: Smart Building

The IoT-Ness of Smart Buildings

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The Internet of Things is advancing a new breed of smart buildings that are better aligned with the priorities of property owners and managers. IoT enables systems that deliver more accurate and useful information for improving operations and providing the best experiences for tenants. But how do we move forward with large-scale IoT deployments in buildings? TIA’s Clarence Reynolds leads this discussion that includes Brad Klenz – Distinguished IoT Analytics Architect, SAS; Leonard Lee, Managing Director and Founder of neXt Curve; and Todd Boucher, Principal and Founder of Leading Edge Design Group.

Connected campus: the next step toward a smart city

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The connected campus is the proving ground for smart cities. Hardly confined to higher education, connected campuses include medical and technology parks as well as corporate campuses and airports that are miniature smart cities. In addition to highly connected workspaces, smart campuses such as those owned by Google and Apple include childcare, sports and recreational facilities, cafeterias, health-care facilities and smart transportation systems.

Standardized single-pair connector interfaces set the pace for intelligent buildings

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The standards committee ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 25 Interconnection of Information Technology Equipment, selected two single-pair connector designs as standard interfaces for MICE1 and . MICE2/MICE3environments. MICE is an acronym for mechanical, ingress, climatic, and electromagnetic — one from CommScope the other from Harting. The higher the number, the more severe the environment. In practical application, an example of a MICE1 (M1I1C1E1) environment is a commercial office space.

Define Smart

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There’s currently no dictionary definition of a smart building, though we seem to be moving towards a shared understanding that for a building to be considered ‘smart’, it should use technology to deliver useful, consistent, user focused experiences as well as space and energy efficiencies. We can contrast this with ‘connected’ and ‘intelligent’ buildings,

Cybersecurity for Smart Buildings

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The increased focus on cybersecurity for smart buildings is being driven by the ever-growing number of networked IoT devices and the convergence of OT and IT security. The seamless interconnection of IoT devices makes smart buildings increasingly vulnerable and susceptible for cyber-attacks with expensive and destructive consequences.

A City is Only As Smart As Its Buildings – Making a case for Retrofits

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As Smart Cities gain traction, there are some shining examples of possibility. However, 99% of the existing buildings in any city remain dumb. Addressing the intelligence level of the majority of buildings is the key to creating smart, clean, and human-centric urban environments. New solutions are evolving to address this problem. The smart building retrofit offering is evolving rapidly to serve the needs of all kinds of buildings. Approaching its 90th birthday, the Empire State Building in New York has been retrofitted with advanced technologies, achieving a 38% reduction in energy consumption. Younger buildings are registering significantly higher savings, with minimal installation costs, as retrofit technology is designed for common legacy systems.

Smart transceiver now supports both LonWorks and BACnet protocols

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Adesto’s FT 6050 Smart Transceiver system-on-chip (SoC) now natively supports LON®, LON/IP, BACnet/IP, and BACnet MS/TP protocol stacks. This capability will help modernize and simplify automation and control networks, especially in smart buildings. Its open systems approach allows BACnet workstations and LON network manager and integrator tools to natively field-configure, provision, and monitor controllers as either LON or BACnet devices, or both.

$7.5B smart city project announced in Las Vegas Valley

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Real estate investment trust Bleutech Park Properties announced plans for a $7.5 billion project in the Las Vegas Valley that will showcase a range of smart city technology, from autonomous vehicles to internet of things (IoT) devices to smart buildings with “self-healing concrete.” The project will break ground in December and is projected to take six years to complete.
 

Integration is Key to a Smart Building’s Success or Failure

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Fixing the integration problem is fast becoming a key challenge for the smart building sector to overcome according to many experts. “Successful digital transformation is like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. It’s still the same organism, but it now has superpowers,” says George Westerman, a research scientist at the MIT Center for Digital Business. When digital transformation is done wrong, however, “all you have is a really fast caterpillar,” he points out, “and it’s hard to keep up with your competitors if you’re crawling ahead while they can fly.”