Predictive Office Buildings?

1. Introduction

Buildings consume around 40% of the total energy production in the European Union, and 36% of CO2 emissions. As the building industry is growing each year, it will continue to increase its associated footprint in terms of energy consumption and carbon emissions, especially due to the high energy demand of existing buildings and new data centers.

To achieve the climate targets of the European Union and to achieve smarter and more sustainable-energy independent solutions for the building sector, a huge investment is required. There are already great examples in the market of what opportunities lie in new smart building developments. But the biggest demand for savings is in existing buildings, more than 80% of German real state is older than 25 years, the question is that how can smart solutions and platforms be used to make the existing building stock future proof in both public and private sectors? Are these buildings ready to use in the future only by considering energy efficiency measures? 

What the buildings of the future look like depends largely on decisions we make today. The goal is to improve the quality of life for people, client comfort economic growth, and protect environment to reach energy neutrality by 2050.

In this document we focus on existing office buildings. Office buildings are becoming increasingly smart, but does this mean that such offices will also become more intelligent and user-friendly? How does an office have to be planned, built, or converted and operated to achieve the maximum possible effect on flexibility and productivity combined with low operating costs and environmental pollution? And, how does a smart building match with sustainable or energy efficient requirements? 

Our goal is to make a so-called, predictive existing office building, a reality. A predictive office building must automatically use the built-in system and the consistently collected data to ensure continuous optimization of the building. The keyword here is the more or less autonomous building and can be identified and explored as the solution. Automation has long been a focus for facility managers, also forward-thinking facility managers showed interest in implementing new digital technologies to improve maintenance decisions, operations (via intelligent analytics gleaned from connected building systems) and to optimize comfort, and energy spend. There are some important measures to consider before digital transformation to autonomous decisions happens: 

• Build a solid plan: What are the specific, measurable goals that your organization wants to accomplish through an IoT-leveraged building management system (BMS) used in existing buildings.  
• Include all key stakeholders: This plan should involve all the facility’s stakeholders. The stakeholders should take time to establish goals and objectives that align with the values and mission of the organization and evaluate ROI before broadening scope. Then, they should collaborate with contractors and vendors to produce the most effective strategy. 
• Technology integration and interoperability: Aim for a holistic—not siloed—approach to adding systems that comprise the building’s IoT network backbone. These various devices and systems must also be scalable, adaptable, and able to integrate with the BMS. Organizations should be prepared to expand systems in the future as new technologies emerge and additional features and capabilities are needed.  
• Intelligent building data analysis: While advanced BMS’s can aggregate and deliver large amounts of data, facilities managers and other employees need a robust analytics tool to translate the relevant data into actionable insights and measurable results. 
• Cybersecurity and data privacy: Increased connectivity and data capture means more opportunity for data leaks and breaches. With that in mind, companies and organizations should employ cybersecurity and data protection software and other products specially built for the IoT age, not retrofit existing security solutions. In addition, instituting data collection, storage and use governance, among other cybersecurity policies, will help secure company data.  

2. Smart Building Roadmap to 2050 

Carbon neutrality “is a good and realistic goal as long as we are clear about what that requires for the buildings.” To achieve an energy and carbon neutral condition in 2050, the energy usage of buildings will have to be cut anywhere from 50 to 85 percent. Electrification, renewable energy and energy efficiency measures provide over 90% of the reductions required by 2050.

Only in 2019 approximately 33 Gigatons of CO2 emissions were emitted, which need to be reduced drastically and immediately to achieve a carbon neutral condition in 2050, and to bring temperature rise to the well-below 2°C climate goal.

Figure 1 CO2 emissions in 2019 

Smart technologies can bring new opportunities in design, execution and operation of the buildings, so we must ensure the technology installed today is future proofed and operate more efficiently. As many developments will be designed for a life cycle of more than 50 years, and so beyond the year 2050, the following will investigate some required efficiency and sustainability technologies need to be considered in the design, execute and operation stages of the buildings. 

3. BIM and Digital Twin and Energy Efficiency

Energy savings are planned and targeted during the design phase. To reduce the gap between predicted and actual building performance proactively the Building Information Modeling (BIM) can be utilized. BIM is one of the key measures to meeting the 2050 goals by ability to track, maintain and learn about its digital counterpart and speed up design and construction of built assets. BIM is as a sustainable energy supportive technology for reducing carbon footprint and increase of energy performance, and one of the main areas of smart construction and project management. Virtual reality, augmented reality, and digital twins are other technology applications within the construction sector. 

BIM is developing towards the concept of the Industry 4.0 and Internet of Things. Smart buildings are often compared to “construction 4.0” which relates to “industry 4.0” as a fundamental challenge for the construction industry. Digital Тwin is a significant enabler for Industry 4.0 initiatives and prerequisite for the successful Construction 4. The digital twin can follow all modifications of the real building and dynamically readjusts itself in case of recorded performance differences. This helps to develop cost-effective operation modes, e.g. by introducing new cyber-controlled HVAC systems. The digital twin may also analyze the building’s dynamic response to changes in occupation or energy supply; it also indicates the need for building maintenance or upgrades. Among other things, this planning leads to highest efficiency, best communication, optimal energy efficiency, cost savings and increased sustainability.

BIM and Digital Twin themself are used for collaboration and visualization during design and construction, not operations. The intent of BIM and Digital Twin is to help architects and builders to design and construct the building. After design and construction stages, the execution planning procedure can be developed. 

To effectively integrate BIM into the delivery process, it is important to develop a detailed execution plan for BIM implementation. The execution plan defines how software and team communicate, what are the expectation and how the information is organized.

After the completion of the smart building, operation begins. In an ideal case, the smart building operates independently and autonomously. Unfortunately, this is the ideal case. Manual monitoring and subsequent taxation such as monitoring data within the cloud for errors, monitoring and replacement of the sensors, and update of the software and hardware, must continue.

Currently, construction companies are at different phases in adopting BIM. The goal should be boosting the potential of smart mobility and smart data domains, and to provide a close collaboration of all specialists and stakeholders in different areas of design including smart and sustainable technologies, manufacturing products and construction for a successful design.

4. Digital Asset Management and Energy Efficiency

Asset management (AM) is an important foundation technology underpinning smart buildings and will play a critical role in achieving the overall smart building goals of sustainability and economic development. Asset management systems have traditionally been used by public and private sector organizations to manage and maintain infrastructure assets such as buildings. Smart grids introduce many new intelligent assets that must be managed by utilities and other asset owners or operators, including smart meters, grid sensors, and homes and buildings assets such as rooftop solar panels, in-home displays, and smart thermostats.

Buildings can become "smart" by implementing external integration; voice, video, and data services; and analytics and optimization. Analytics and optimization include categories such as asset management, space management, building services etc. The interconnection of physical assets and information technology can optimize efficiency, production, and consumption in many types of buildings.

A similar approach should be followed for the real estate market. The entire building stock should be considered a portfolio. All buildings need to be fitted out with sensors which collect data. The data then can be uploaded to a digital asset management (DAM) platform. Digital Asset Management solutions could be a proper platform for securely storing your digital content in the cloud. In hotels, sensor instrumentation is already used for real-time asset location and automated workflows such as equipment maintenance. DAMs will not remain a flat, screen-based experience. By 2050, users could be interacting with their systems in totally new ways. Machine learning will allow DAMs to understand both their assets and their users better. Also, big data in DAMs will enable users to make better decisions.

5. IoT and Smart Energy Efficiency 

The Internet of Things can be used to improve the ability to plan and to collect information to better understand the energy consumption issues. 

Energy is one of the main factors that can contribute to sustainable development and the first element to achieve the sustainable energy is the availability of sustainable technologies. There is already a vast amount of sustainable technologies available, but in the following we focus on what is the best option for the future:

1. Energy-Saving Building Solutions: refers to materials, systems and strategies that allow reduction of the energy needed for the construction, operation and maintenance over the lifetime of the building.
2. Materials and Circular Systems: refers to material, water and waste cycles in buildings and their contribution to energy-efficiency and resource savings.
3. Sustainable Energy Transition: refers to the transformation of energy systems on the scale of building and grid towards integrated renewable-energy solutions. 
4. Energy Sharing: refers to the active future role of buildings in the overall energy system, including demand and supply matching and contributions to improved grid stability.
5. ICT & Building Management Systems: this is about the increasing generation and use of data for energy optimization and management in buildings and grids.

The majority of existing old buildings are constructed without considering appropriate energy efficiency, covering heating, cooling, indoor and outdoor humidity and electricity consumptions. However, the amount of required energy and time to raze existing old buildings with new ones is large and not a cost-effective solution. Hence, smart energy of the existing buildings is an important part of smart grids and global sustainability to investigate. Here we list some of the parameters should be considered in the energy controls of buildings: 

• In logging data, these parameters include the heating and cooling energy consumption, the indoor and outdoor humidity and temperature, and the total electricity consumption. 

6. Security and Data Privacy 

Connected devices are the foundation of smart buildings, and little could be accomplished without them. But their presence also poses a security risk that technology must be capable of addressing.

Security is already a major concern in Industry 4.0 and for the future of industries. Security vulnerabilities and privacy threats are making headlines with depressing frequency these days. Sensors, actuators, and physical objects that we use every day to gather, processing and sending data making our lives more convenient, more automate and more vulnerable. So, the task of securing your smart building against security attacks can seem daunting, particularly with growing number of connected devices on the internet and the scope of collected and communicated data (capturing real-time data). 

To handle security vulnerabilities and having more manageable smart building we break it down into a series of security approaches: 

• Risk Management 

The first key component of a smart building design is risk management which can be addressed with 5 layers of physical security and cyber-security approaches. The layers of protection in physical security include property perimeter, reception area, floor levels, department zones and technical spaces. Deploying a layered physical security strategy can provide us with the ability to deter, detect, and detain at every layer of smart building, and reducing the risk of breach. We need to answer this question: What are the main threats to our data and systems? For example, hack smart cards could provide access to smart homes, compromise industrial control systems cause machinery or utilities to run dangerously out of control. Managing risk associated with increased data collection in the internet of things begins by the data we gather more secure against an expanding list of threats. The security is now a moving target, hardware and software work together to increase the severity and satisfaction. Cyber-security risk management strategies will increase vigilance to know when an attack happens and resilience to recover after a breach.  For example: digital networks must be safeguarded with firewalls and data encryption, and system integrity must be ensured with individual systems and terminals protected from access by unauthorized individuals/changes.

Smart Security of physical layer 1 to 5 

We try to define scope of works, provide maintenance and support, also with extra supply change solutions to simplify project through sourcing, inventory management, product enhancement, and global logistics. 

The following shows how to solve these challenges in different layers:  

• The first layer with outdoor LED lighting, emergency communication systems, Day/Night video surveillance, integrated access control, and intrusion detection sensors.  
• The second layer addresses the need to control traffic through visitor management.  
• In the layer 3, through common spaces, the traffic will be monitored for safety and access to various part of the building. Number of solutions including restricted access level control, fire detection and suppression, remote video management, mass notification, destination dispatch and occupancy control can help to filter traffic between different areas. 
• The 4th layer deals with key business areas that requires careful security attention with securing department assets, comply with privacy and information regulations and integrate active directory with security systems, as well as intelligent key lockers and workplace asset management can assist protection of valuable resources and information. 
• The most critical layer protects IT security, networking structure and data storage, solutions include identity recognition access control, video verification and server and network cabinet level locking systems.  
• Smart Security Policy 

The goal should be is to help organizations to mitigate potential vulnerabilities with a mixture of technical and non-technical means. Non-technical factors include, but are not limited to policy, procedure, training, and reporting. The only sustainable approach to protect investments in cyber security smart building begins with, and depends on, good policy. We declare that information, in all forms, will be protected from accidental or intentional unauthorized modification, or destruction throughout its life cycle. 

• Smart Data Privacy and Security 

In the future, cybersecurity will be a key differentiator between intelligent building solutions. Increased uncontrolled data of smart cities creates a huge security gap for attackers. For example: data created by unprotected smart city infrastructures such as parking garages and surveillance can be used to provide attackers with a huge amount of data to steal personal information that can be exploited for fake transactions and identity theft. 

In smart cities the user data and one’s interaction with the public infrastructure needs to be based on the agreements, under one’s control and only for allowed purposes. Blockchain-based technologies in smart cities can contribute to reducing cyber-attacks by providing trusted transactions, data integrity, anonymity, and security. You will need to get more specific as you move toward selection of actual controls. Furthermore, we need to determine what data security and privacy protection laws and regulations apply to your organization? 

• Smart Security Access Control to Enforce the Policy 

Mandatory and discretionary access models restrict access to physical and virtual spaces, but all these traditional access controls have major concerns of infrastructure hacking, unauthorized access, and physical security. The IoT based access controls can contribute to reduce these risks. For example, malicious nodes located in network can influence time synchronization. In this point, a secure scheme based on blockchain, such as safe time synchronization systems can be deployed as a mitigation strategy against tampering and spoofing.

Also, rapid deployment of smart grid systems without considering security planning could lead to disclosure of energy consumption of customers and their availability. Cryptographic-key management and update, routine maintenance and monitoring for cyber-intrusion are big challenges in the electrical grid. 

As a result, manufacturers need to integrate security in both the hardware and the software at the onset, and businesses are going to have to adapt better controls on devices, develop stronger anti-virus software, implement encryption safeguards, and protect energy systems from malicious intrusions. Businesses must determine their willingness to pay to add various security measures to their operations and equipment. It is crucial to take this risks seriously as energy grids increasingly are under attack from foreign adversaries as well as amateur hackers.

7. Conclusion  

This report makes a stating of what is needed to achieve a carbon neutral condition by 2050 in the smart buildings. We investigate some of the most important possibilities to create a highly efficient, sustainable and productive working environment with low operating costs and the smallest possible environment impact through technology. As a result, methods and techniques that used in the design construction and operation are mentioned and their challenges and the solutions that can contribute to energy efficiency and sustainable development are integrated and addressed in the paper.