Chat with my Building | The Intersection of Automation and Chatbots

It’s 4:45pm on a Thursday afternoon. Carl is the maintenance supervisor for a 20-story business building. He just got into his car, wrapping up the day, when he gets a notification on his mobile: You’ve been added to a Whatsapp group called “Primary Pump #5 Alert”. He joins the discussion where three other colleagues, from the maintenance department, are already in the group. The 1st message in the group shows “Primary pump #5, zone 1 alarm, type command to get alarm details”. Carl types “$list alarms” and the details of the alarm are shown. Carl chats with his colleagues on the cause of the alarm and finds out that it’s a false alarm caused by a routine maintenance activity. He sends a command in the chat room “$reset alarms” and drives home to enjoy the weekend!

This is not science fiction! It’s a practical use case of using chatbots in building maintenance automation!

The World of Chatbots and Automation

Automation and chatbots are no longer a new concept. Chatbots are widely used today to simplify communication between a customer and a company, creating better user experiences and helping address recurring issues which do not need human interaction. Automation, through the use of Internet of Things technology and smart connected systems, enables the communication between a building management system (BMS) and all associated building components.

Integration of Chatbots and Automation

By integrating a chatbot with the building management system and creating a “simple set of commands to interact with the BMS”, a maintenance crew is able to get notified automatically when an alarm occurs, where the chatbot instantly creates a chat room with the “alarm info”. The system pulls up - from the maintenance scheduling system - the list of team members currently on-duty or on-call and automatically adds them into the chat. The team queries the BMS system through simple commands and decides on the best course of action. In many cases, the team might be able to deal with the alarm remotely. If a voice conversation is needed, the same chat room can be used to establish a conference call.

The event and all associated actions are permanently logged, which would be great learning material for future team members.

A World of Possibilities

The intersection of chatbots and automation can create endless possibilities. Any smart system, connecting objects and devices, can be queried and controlled through a “custom” chat language. Imagine a fleet management system, in which a vehicle generates a “check engine alarm”, which is handled by a similar chat room exercise, to determine that the vehicle needs to visit the workshop to repair an oil leak.

These systems can be further enhanced through AI-based bots which can make recommendations - using artificial intelligence - on the best course of action based on past events.

We live in a hyper-connected world, where we expect services to be available 24/7 ! Systems like these will help us deal with the plethora of data around us, make sense of it and provide us all – end users  and maintenance crews – with a better experience!

-- Hani Khalaf