Published on 11/15/2017 | Use Cases
“Investments on Smart Building Solution typically pay the returns in upcoming two or three years in form of energy savings and maintenance efficiencies”
Current Energy Efficiency Challenges
Building automation solutions have their presence around for years, but their high cost has traditionally been difficult to justify for many commercial, industrial, and institutional facilities. Now, more affordable technologies and the Internet of Things (IoT) are being used to drive down cost, add new capabilities, and change the market dynamics for building management.
We have developed an IoT-based solution using a smart gateway, sensors, systems that bring energy savings to businesses, minimizes power and water consumption, and provides superior tenant/facility services. This Smart Building Platform (SBP) is helping to improve space and amenities utilization experience, while supporting environment-friendly practices.
Impact of various environmental systems to improve Building Efficiencies
Reducing energy consumption is good for both the human life and the environment. It can also be essential for compliance with government initiatives. For example, in India, the government is actively promoting conservation programs and implementing smart city solution in many cities
Smart Building Platform (SBP) offers a cost-effective way to reduce the amount of energy wasted in commercial buildings. We are predicting that implementation of the SBP will expect to save them about 9% in power usage during the first year and around 20 to 30 % thereafter, following further efficiency enhancements.
Smart Buildings. Satisfied Facility, Tenants & Visitor.
Common smart building use cases cover a wide range of building management issues. Making buildings smarter can have a positive impact on operations, tenants and visitors.
Smart Energy Management
• Open Areas: SBP avoids unnecessary heating and cooling in public areas based on the preferences and behavior of occupants, potentially reducing energy usage by 10 percent, even with the most efficient HVAC units. Another 10 percent can be saved by the solution’s predictive capabilities, which allow for higher average temperatures in summer and lower temperatures in winter.
• Conference/Meeting Rooms: Following a thorough analysis of the building systems, the SBP can be configured to turn equipment on/off throughout the day to minimize energy consumption. For instance, lighting and HVAC systems could be turned off when meeting attendees leave a conference room. Automatic operation can be overridden manually.
• Elevators: The solution takes advantage of regenerative motors in elevators to pump current back into the electrical network when they are going down, thus cutting total energy usage by 15 to 35 %. The SBP generate the reports and dashboard for maintenances and pre-schedule services.
• Swimming Pools: The cost of heating a swimming pool can be reduced by 20–30 % with energy-efficient heat pumps that move heat from one place to another, instead of generating heat themselves.
• Renewable Energy: The SBP enables companies to use less energy, reuse rain water, and utilize renewable energy sources, such as solar.
Fitness Center: For building uses we have integrated Fitness app which shows the availabilities of various machines for them, it will save 10 -20% energy through pre-booking of machines.
Improving Tenant Experience
• Scheduling Management: The SBP schedules lighting and air-conditioning systems to turn on/off for offices, conference rooms, or floors. Automated scheduling makes it easier to achieve energy-saving goals, because it does not rely on human intervention. It can also be prevailed, as needed, for one-time or periodical requests.
• Electricity Sharing: This SBP also works in shared offices or organizations where this platform can calculate each organization’s energy usage and charge the corresponding cost to the associated financial department. These costs can be assessed by meter reading value, fixed amount, or percentage and also reduce human efforts and cost for continuous monitoring.
• Energy Consumption Analysis: The SBP provides demand and consumption by period and device in table summary. The solution analyzes energy-saving performance in accordance with the energy-savings unit trends.
• Energy Demand Management: The SBP monitors energy consumption on a per-control-system basis and automatically manages power usage to avoid exceeding contractual energy consumption limits and incurring fines.
• Smart Occupancy: Data analytics tools are used to optimize the conference room environment based on user behavior. The SBP accesses the conference reservation system, handheld devices, lighting system, projection equipment, office furniture, and the air-conditioning system. It analyzes this data to determine what adjustments the occupants are making and how resources are being used. This analysis provides a better understanding of usage models and allows the building manager to optimize the system to satisfy occupant preferences.
• Smart Parking: Using the SBP, building users & visitors can find parking spots more quickly. Our parking reservation system that manages building users, guest information, such as name, license plate number, and time of arrival, a personalized parking experience can be provided for visitors.
Improving Visitors Experience
Increase Energy Efficiency, Even in old buildings
Old commercial buildings are typically energy-inefficient due to legacy systems are used, which require improvement from windows, lighting, insulation, advanced heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (i.e., HVAC). To increase energy efficiency and building performance we require firmware which gather the data from various systems and send to SBP, where this platform analysis the data and send the back commend to firmware which control or turn on/off the systems. In detail to reduce energy usage further, the SBP performs ongoing measurement and verification of energy usage, allowing for continuous improvements through:
• Demand Response: By communicating in real-time with utilities, smart buildings can reduce energy usage during peak utility loads, thus enabling building managers to take advantage of lower utility rates and credits.
• Smart Building Concept: By coordinating the operation of both new and old building equipment (e.g., HVAC), energy can be saved by running energy-efficient equipment more frequently and energy-inefficient equipment less often.
• Data Analytics: By performing data analytics in the cloud, building managers can better understand occupant behavior and schedules, allowing them to turn off building systems (e.g., HVAC, lighting) when not needed.
• Visibility and Manageability: By using the solution’s dashboards and granular analysis and control functionality, building engineers can more efficiently and effectively manage building systems.
SBP collects building data from environmental sensors (temperature, motion, humidity, and occupancy) and equipment (HVAC, heat pumps, and lighting), analyzes the data, and then controls the equipment operation based on tenant and building management requirements. Smart gateways collect data from building devices and equipment, and send the data to a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition
(SCADA) system and into the SBP. The SBP then analyzes the data and determines how to control the building equipment to match the tenants’ requirements. The SBP next automatically changes equipment operation without human intervention.
Smart Building Architecture
The SBP architecture shown in uses the smart gateway to collect data from building sensors, devices, and systems, and sends the data to the cloud through a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) network. SBP processes the data and helps building managers measure and control energy consumption. Although the system can be overridden for manual or human intervention, if required.
The SBP handles both energy and building management, performing a wide range of functions related to power, lighting, air conditioners, environment, heat pumps, and building access.
We are arranging workshop where different stakeholders, researchers, industries etc., in order to present the most recent advances in the area of ICT- and IoT-based Energy Efficiency solutions. It will also promote the collaboration and mutual exchange of experiences between users.
The more topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
About Author:
Atul Mandvariya is the IoT/M2M solutions business manager at Softweb Solutions. He has a background in helping companies transition from legacy to modern systems and now focuses on helping them realize the advantages of IoT across their value chain.
