Feedback on IBS 2023

The 2023 edition of the Salon IBS (Intelligent Building Systems) closed last Wednesday.

In a context of tumult around the BACS and tertiary decrees and issues linked to energy costs, the conferences and workshops were the site of lively discussions.

Smart Phone, Smart TV, Smart Car, the smart movement is on the way and the Smart Building is proof of it.

Tuesday morning, Serge Le Men , one of the SMART subject enthusiasts at 阿西布朗勃法瑞公司（ABB） , told us during a conference on communication protocols: "we really need to Smartize buildings as much as possible", smartize, make smart, yes.. . but this raises two questions: what is smart? and above all do we need it?

As a consultant, I often ask this question: "Do you need a car ?" and the answer is mostly: Yes, ... However, no one needs a car! ... We need to travel (even improve self-esteem), the car is only the means of this transportation. We still too often confuse the goal, needs and means. We do not need DATA, Digital, SMART, AI, these are means, tools which should allow us to provide answers to problems.

From my point of view, in a world where the socio-economic issues linked to buildings are huge and where the ecological impact of our technological choices tends to determine our future, it seems really important to consider technology as a tool and not as end in itself.

We were able to perceive this importance, particularly on socio-economic issues, for example, by hearing that "commercial real estate is currently experiencing a major structural upheaval". Eric BOUVIER of La Fran?aise profiteering points out that their economic model was in the process of completely changing: "from a transaction economy, where the added value automatically resulted from the increase in the value of the land and the building, we are in transitioning to an operating economy where the added value will be in the "daily life" of the building and the majority of this valuation will revolve around data.

This led to a mass of fascinating questions around data governance, which was at the center of several conferences: for example, Raphael Contamin from EQUANS who raised the following question: "who owns the data? To the owner of Buildings, to those who operate the systems that produce them, to users, ...? ", and Gabriel Chegaray to broaden the reflection by talking about the challenges of specialized players like Orange Business who want to position themselves on this market "

In all these exchanges, we clearly feel that the DATA subject is becoming a central subject, a social subject. Because beyond the economic aspects of the question, we also touch on notions of political power and sovereignty (on this subject have a look on Asma MHALLA conferences).

A fortiori in this context, the word cyber-security comes on many lips, Lilian Caule , a more than recognized expert on the subject, challenges us with the example of the cyberattack suffered by the Target store chain where hackers exploited a flaw in the HVAC system which allowed them to access systems containing customers' banking data, "from the moment we connect systems to the internet, these systems are potentially attackable and their vulnerabilities can impact everyone the systems that are connected to it", it then becomes essential to ask : How to secure, protect and make this (one's) data reliable?

But, above all, the key subject of this edition was: Convergence and interoperability

The building and its components (hardware and software), beyond their primary functions, by becoming Smart become service supports. To better understand how the building becomes Smart Building, we can make the analogy with the phone becoming SmartPhone.

The mobile phone became SmartPhone, not so much by the arrival of the iPhone, which in 2008, although being a certain innovation in the user experience, brought, at the beginning, in addition to the telephone, only a touch interface and the possibility of listening to music (and some applications), mainly by the context of that time (the emergence of Web 2.0, but also the growing place of open source) which pushed Apple and Google to become platforms with IOS and Android, platforms which allowed the user to easily access applications created by developers whose work was greatly facilitated.

In the same way, the building becomes Smart, becoming a service platform, not only to optimize energy efficiency, or make office life more pleasant for employees and more profitable for employers but also and above all because the The question of mixed uses will and must become a central question in the organization of our cities and that smart buildings can become a formidable tool for this organization.

This question of diversity of uses (chronotopia), which was already the subject of fascinating discussions between Céline Crestin and Franck Boutté this summer during the Building Beyond festival organized by Leonard , has begun to present itself in discussions within IBS, further reinforcing the interest in seeing the building and its components become truly Smart.

But unlike a smartPhone, designed and produced by a single manufacturer, the building is the result of the combination of skills and work of many entities. It is in fact a system composed of multiple and disparate systems.

However, as with the smartphone, the challenge is to make life easier for developers, so that they can easily offer applications to users, operators, owners, ignoring all the complexity, all the diversity of the systems that make up building.

Good news, initiatives going in this direction exist. We call them BOS, DIGITAL TWIN, MIDDLEWARE, ... software publishers such as SpinalCom or VayanData offer solutions which aim to aggregate data from multiple systems in the field to make them available, operable and in a transparently for developers. Initiatives in this direction are also being carried out by manufacturers such as WAGO Corporation , Distech Controls , SAUTER (and others) who have worked to integrate IoT, Web and Cloud connectivity technologies directly into their products (RESTful API, MQTT SparkPlug, Azure ...) with real reflection around the opening and convergence of data

Nevertheless, all these players are unanimous, for this to work, working habits, from design to operation, must evolve and "new players become essential": these are DIGITAL ACA (Assistant to the Contracting Authority) and the MSI (Master System Integrator): let us cite for example Bruno Souyris of VayanData, “to effectively deploy our BOS we really need the skills of an MSI, right from the design phases”.

To go further, another term that received unanimous support during discussions around convergence and interoperability is transversality. Many building stakeholders are understanding that this notion of digital transversality is becoming one of the keystones of smart building.

Working to develop this digital transversality means succeeding in bringing together skills and expertise such as that of ACA Digital and that of MSI, while applying methods, management strategies and systemic design (a bit like in the vision of system of system dear to Alain DESPIAU-PEYRALADE ),

Managing digital transversality will become a major challenge for the success of Smart Building throughout the life of the building. From the beginning of the design, then, of course during the production phases, but also throughout its operation, this is where the DTM concept of SYNAPTIK (Digital Transversality Manager) takes on its full meaning.