Thomas Hartman, The Hartman Company
Over the years of regularly attending conferences on the tourism industry, I have heard what building owners, engineers, and architects discuss, and I know their ideas about what a smart building is. This article provides a list of what is required for buildings to be truly “smart.”
To be honest, very few of the properties we have discussed and that I have visited come close to these simple and largely intuitive criteria. That is the reality. A lot needs to change to fully benefit from the smart home. Let's get to the truly critical elements of a smart home. I have divided them into three categories.
Here are the first two:
1. Renters
These are the people for whom living space is everything.
A smart home is precisely what provides a simple procedure for identifying residents, maintains comfortable conditions that meet environmental standards and other safety aspects. A smart home also provides services that ensure the life of people in the building.
2. Structures and systems
A smart home is equipped with systems that minimize environmental damage (such as depletion of natural resources) associated with ensuring a long service life of the building.
There are other important factors: the specific climate and purpose of the building, which significantly simplify the structures of buildings that provide for such needs as: protecting people from the sun, rain, and also implementing the idea of natural lighting and ventilation.
Such buildings would completely satisfy the residents, not to mention that they fully comply with the requirements of points 1 and 2, but they cannot be fully recognized as “smart”, since the third condition is not met.
3. High-tech approach
A “smart home” is truly such because the microclimate created in it and the specific purpose correspond to points 1 and 2, and also because the corresponding high technologies were used in the implementation of the above. Of course, there is nothing wrong with the fact that the first two points are implemented without a special technological approach. Quite the contrary, this approach to the design and construction of buildings is preferable. Sometimes our industry must take a step back in order to advance smart construction technologies.
But such buildings (or individual parts of the building) do not require the use of high technologies, and without this the building cannot be classified as a “smart home”.
It sounds simple enough. But if that is true, why do so many buildings that claim to be smart in terms of their interiors end up being stuck in the dark? In my experience, the main reason for this is that most architects, manufacturers, contractors and operators rely on the technology they have, rather than the technology they need. It is this fatal flaw that is holding back the growth of the smart building sector. Smart home technologies have become a market that is shaping our industry.
However, transforming the market requires the integration of truly new concepts and technologies, not just the expansion and integration of existing ones. Otherwise, we will end up with more or less traditional buildings, as many smart homes built today are.
Until now, only a few architects have been able to incorporate bold new approaches to such things as site selection and the implementation of natural lighting into their projects. Such examples have a positive impact on both the home and the outside environment. However, the technical community has largely adopted the concepts, systems and strategies that are already widely used, capturing only a small part of the unique qualities of some bold projects — clearly not enough to elevate the idea of the home above the traditional understanding.
Let's consider what is really required to create a smart home based on promising engineering systems.
It is necessary to focus on the real needs of the residents — it is not for nothing that they are mentioned in the first place in the list above. After all, it is the building owners and tenants who are the ultimate goal of any commercial construction. This factor significantly prevails over others. Below is my personal list of important technological aspects with which it is necessary to start a discussion of the concept of a smart home:
1. Comfort and air quality.
We need to understand that any modern home requires, at a minimum, heating and/or air conditioning, as well as an air quality control system that covers all residential areas of the building, providing residents with comfort around the clock. The current standards allow for 20% of residents dissatisfied with the microclimate, as well as one temperature sensor for 3-5 rooms. This practice must be abolished, replaced by a more active approach to providing residents with comfort, both in terms of temperature and air quality.
2. Human-centered ventilation, heating and air conditioning system (HVAC system).
In the light of ensuring a comfortable temperature and air quality, it can be seen that the previous approach is to uniformly air-condition and ventilate the entire building, essentially ignoring the number and location of residents. This approach in smart homes should be replaced by a different concept, which will be based on targeted comfort and distribution of air purification services in accordance with the actual location of people.
3. Individual microclimate control and feedback.
To be successful in providing comfort to building residents, a smart home must provide residents with feedback. Residents of such a home must be provided with easy-to-manage automated microclimate control systems.
They need the means to create an information request about the state of the microclimate in the room in order to provide the building automation with feedback.
4. Automatic optimization of the system and verification of its effectiveness.
Tomorrow's building automation networks must effectively control comfort levels and air quality. They use equipment optimized for the system as a whole, rather than individually selected components. Control must be provided by monitoring actual system performance indicators, which allows for automatic correction if optimum efficiency is not achieved. From the point of view of human needs, energy efficiency is most relevant. This requirement will be included in the list of essential attributes of a smart home.
5. Connection to the building's IT infrastructure.
Most designers recognize the need for building engineering systems to be easily integrated into the local IT infrastructure. Then residents can easily connect to local and regional information networks of their choice, both outside and inside the building.
However, the building systems themselves must also be integrated into this information network.
The provision of services such as automatic call response (remote request), neighborhood monitoring (accident detection), and remote support functions should be developed. These network services should be implemented based on standard tools and protocols.
Whenever my colleagues and I discuss the list of requirements for a smart home, we come to the conclusion that smart building projects will require the development of network services.
Yes, a highly integrated network is already a solid foundation for a smart home, but too often there is a lack of consideration of what additional services should be provided on that network. As a result, the design team usually settles on services that really fit well into the control scheme.
This means that comfort functions suffer, the effectiveness of the fault detection system is reduced, and residents do not have sufficient access to control it.
The degree of integration of this system into the standard telecommunications platform is insufficient, without which the efficient work of maintenance personnel is impossible. Buildings are entirely under the supervision of owners, tenants, and maintenance personnel, in fact, work in the old way.
In order to take a step towards owners, tenants and respond to the challenge posed by energy and environmental problems, we cannot do without seamless integration, implemented in smart home projects.
If you are discussing the potential of the smart home idea with colleagues, do not forget that the basis of the project of a truly smart building is modern technologies that significantly increase the level of comfort and environmental friendliness. At the same time, the impact of building systems on the environment is minimized.
By accepting this, we will instantly put together a disparate mosaic into a complete picture of what is really required from a smart home.
Based on materials from the AutomatedBuildings website |
