Designing smart buildings

According to the Building Efficiency Initiative, a smart building is broadly defined as a building that delivers useful services that make occupants productive at the lowest cost and environmental impact over the building’s life cycle.

A smart building aspires to be agile, responsive and adaptive to its users. Data generated by the building should continuously inform system operation, enabling the building to take proactive steps, anticipating user needs and optimizing target outcomes.

A smart building requires adding intelligence from the start of the design phase to the end of the building’s useful life. Smart buildings use converged networks during operation to connect a variety of subsystems, which traditionally operate independently, so that these systems can share information to enhance total building performance.