What is a Smart Building?

The first buildings ever constructed were primitive shelters made from stones, sticks, animal
skins and other natural materials. While they hardly resembled the steel and glass that make up a
modern city skyline, these early structures had the same purpose - to provide a comfortable space
for the people inside.
Buildings today are complex concatenations of structures, systems and technology. Over time,
each of the components inside a building has been developed and improved, allowing modernday building owners to select lighting, security, heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems
independently, as if they were putting together a home entertainment system.
But building owners today are beginning to look outside the four walls and consider the impact
of their building on the electrical grid, the mission of their organization, and the global
environment. To meet these objectives, it is not enough for a building to simply contain the
systems that provide comfort, light and safety. Buildings of the future must connect the various
pieces in an integrated, dynamic and functional way. This vision is a building that seamlessly
fulfills its mission while minimizing energy cost, supporting a robust electric grid and mitigating
environmental impact.
At the most fundamental level, smart buildings deliver useful building services that make
occupants productive (e.g. illumination, thermal comfort, air quality, physical security, sanitation,
and many more) at the lowest cost and environmental impact over the building lifecycle.
Reaching this vision requires adding intelligence from the beginning of design phase through to
the end of the building's useful life. Smart buildings use information technology during operation
to connect a variety of subsystems, which typically operate independently, so that these systems
can share information to optimize total building performance. Smart buildings look beyond the
building equipment within their four walls. They are connected and responsive to the smart
power grid, and they interact with building operators and occupants to empower them with new
levels of visibility and actionable information.
Enabled by technology, this smart building connects the structure itself to the functions it exists
to fulfill:

Connecting building systems

Connecting people and technology

Connecting to the bottom line

Connecting to the global environment

Connecting to the smart power grid

Connecting to an intelligent future

Connecting Building Systems

Modern buildings contain complex mechanical devices, sophisticated control systems and a suite
of features to improve the safety, comfort and productivity of occupants. Many of these systems
involve machine-to-machine communication, but because the data is general in nature and the
communication protocols have been proprietary, information only flows along certain paths. The
smart building will require connectivity between all the equipment and systems in a building. An
example is chiller plant optimization, which boosts the efficiency of chiller operation by
incorporating outside weather data and information about occupancy. Another example is using
data from the building security system to turn off lights and reduce cooling when occupants are
not present.
The movement toward interoperable, connected devices and systems within a building requires
cooperation between many different parties, many of whom are historical business competitors.
Despite the challenge, voluntary collaboration over the past two decades has led to the adoption
of open standards such as BACnet, Modbus, and LonWorks1, leveling the playing field by
enabling every manufacturer and contractor to make their contribution to a functional whole. The
result is a building where lighting, air conditioning, security and other systems pass data freely
back and forth leading to higher efficiency, more safety and comfort, and lower cost operation
of the facility.
Connecting People and Technology
The most sophisticated software and elaborate hardware in the world would be nothing but wires
and transistors without the people that use them to work more effectively. In that sense, the
people that run a smart building are a crucial component of its intelligence.
With budgets tight and staff constrained, there is no room for difficult training and steep learning
curves in modern day facility management. Instead, a truly smart building provides intuitive
tools that are designed to improve and enhance the existing efforts of the people on the ground.
As the smart building evolves, the sharing of information between smart building systems and
components will provide the platform for innovation. Future applications will appear as facility
managers interact with tools and technology to do their jobs better providing more comfort,
more safety, and more security with less money, less energy, and less environmental impact.
Connecting to the Bottom Line
A smart building can be considered a supersystem of interconnected building subsystems; it
has been compared to the internet, which connects computer networks into one larger
supernetwork. In a smart building, the integration of systems can be used to reduce operating
costs.
There are numerous ways that a smart building can save money; most involve optimized
operation and increased efficiency:

Optimized cooling and ventilation equipment Modeling loads dynamically allows the
system to spend the minimum amount of money to provide the comfort level desired.

Matching occupancy patterns to energy use A smart building will run leaner (and save
money) when there are less people inside.

Proactive maintenance of equipment Analysis algorithms will detect problems in

performance before they cause expensive outages, maintaining optimum efficiency along
the way.

Dynamic power consumption By taking signals from the electricity market and altering
usage in response, a smart building ensures the lowest possible energy costs and often
generates revenue by selling load reductions back to the grid.

The open access to information is a platform on which significant value can be built. A smart
building creates this platform by connecting information in an open format, allowing for the
development of new applications that save time, energy, and operating costs, in the same way
that new web applications are developed for the open information found on the internet.
Connecting to the Global Environment
For decades, building management systems have automated the process of providing just enough
energy to heat and cool buildings to meet comfort standards. These energy efficiency measures
contribute to an organizations sustainability goals, such as tracking and reducing greenhouse gas
emissions. But if the data is trapped within the building management system, executive-level
decision-makers cannot measure and act on it.
Translation software called middleware gathers data from all automated systems throughout an
enterprise regardless of manufacturer or communications protocol and merges it into a
common platform for analytics and reporting. One result is the emergence of web-based
dashboard displays that offer a visual snapshot of which facilities are experiencing high energy
usage, abnormal maintenance costs, and many other situations that deserve prompt attention.
This provides executives in charge of sustainability and carbon footprint management with the
visibility to see the big picture of their organization, no matter how many buildings or
geographic locations are involved. When information is available quickly and can be accessed
anywhere, managers are able to make better decisions that have an immediate impact on
profitability.
Connecting to the Smart Power Grid
Truly smart buildings will leverage knowledge that resides outside its walls and windows. The
smart grid is an ideal place to start. Electricity markets are evolving toward real time, meaning
that buildings can receive requests to reduce demand when wholesale prices are high or when

grid reliability is jeopardized. In addition, dynamic electric rates are a growing trend, meaning a
building is charged closer to the actual cost of producing electricity at the instant it is used
instead of the average cost over long time periods.
For instance, a utility on the smart grid may be programmed to read the weather forecast, and
anticipate a temperature increase that will result in increased demand the following afternoon.
The utility could communicate an offer to pay the smart building $0.50 for every kilowatt-hour
drop from its average electricity usage. A smart building could accept this offer by activating an
internal demand-reduction mode and thereby reducing its load.
While energy use and occupant comfort are crucial to any organization and therefore require
human involvement in the decision-making, technology will be the key enabler, providing
building operators with the tools and information they need to make smart choices. (Facility
managers are constrained as it is; there would be very limited response to participating in a smart
grid if it required operators to perform a second job monitoring markets and reacting to
signals.)

Connecting to an Intelligent Future

Smart buildings go far beyond saving energy and contributing to sustainability goals. They
extend capital equipment life and also impact the security and safety of all resources both
human and capital. They enable innovation by creating a platform for accessible information.
They turn buildings into virtual power generators by allowing operators to shed electric load and
sell the negawatts into the market. They are a key component of a future where information
technology and human ingenuity combine to produce the robust, low-carbon economy
envisioned for the future.
The advantages extend well beyond the four physical walls of the smart building. The electric
grid becomes more robust and reliable. Societys carbon footprint is minimized as renewable
energy sources provide the power, balanced with a network of information that matches demand
with variable supply on a minute-by-minute basis. Electric cars move people to homes and
workplaces, serving as moving batteries in a smart system. And businesses operate at a new level
of efficiency by using data in new ways, leveraging the connection between systems that until
now have been entirely independent. These benefits are not temporary, but extend throughout the
entire lifetime of the building, from modeling and design to renovation and beyond.
The smart building is at the center of this vision, providing not just the roof overhead, but also
the information infrastructure to make possible a truly intelligent world.