1 minute read time.
Digital Transformation for built environments is ready to enhance sustainability designs explained Mr. Jacky Chan who is the Associate Director and the Advanced Digital Engineering (ADE) Leader at Arup.

Mr. Chan explained how artificial intelligence (A.I) and machine learning (M.L) is an enabler for efficiency and optimisation. Operational technology building mechanisms like fire alarms, water, building materials all traditionally had to be manually monitored, however in the new smart buildings being introduced, with the use of sensors or IoT devices, green sustainability and civic life will likely benefit. He described the use of 'building intelligence' will give optimisation levels of 30% and this is without the use of other sustainable mechanism like solar panel, wind or e-generators.


With the right connectivity protocol that connects these buildings into a united monitoring system these efficiencies can scale - and not only for each building, but the efficiency can be horizontally aligned into new embedded IoT services like fire monitoring and air conditioning. With the use of data monitoring points, buildings will be (perhaps) be able to provide 'suggested' schematics on how the building particulars should be organised for example, for each weather season, imagine that a building might advise you that 'its external weather' feed is suggesting a prolonged heat wave so 'automatically' suggests operational schematics in order to reduce heating resource configurations - these small incremental 'deltas' that are identified provide efficiencies that we all will benefit from including third party service enhancements such as a fire sensors that might self suggest optimal configurations based of data collected from other building statistics.


He explained how proof of engineering-concept plays a key part in built environments and the ability to have modern software that allows different civic use cases to be simulated has been pivotal to progressing from smart into intelligent buildings. Modern buildings consume (and is expected to) digest data from many disparate systems and in that ability more confident decisions can be made to lead digital building transformation designs.


This was a real-life presentation on how built environments are already using smart technology and how we might transition into 'building intelligence'. 


Read more about 'Built Environment Factfiles' on the IET link here.