Technical Program

BUENO connects to more than 250 buildings with a total floor area of 80 M sq. ft. This covers a wide range of facilities including shopping centers, schools and universities, hospitals, hotels and commercial office buildings. However, these buildings provide a wealth of other opportunities, as there is a lot more to the operation of a building than its HVAC system. In fact, many of these other systems’ current operating methods are outdated and rely on manual monitoring or reporting, in some cases still using paper records, so there is much to be gained from applying system analytics, optimization, fault detection and business intelligence to these systems.

Although analytics for HVAC and metering systems are mainly focused on energy savings, this is not necessarily the case for other systems in the building. Often, the systems are also much simpler than HVAC systems due to a lack of upstream or downstream effects. For example, the main driver for analytics on fire systems is risk management, which is easily improved via continuous monitoring. Similarly, systems which are prone to faults, such as vertical transport (lifts and escalators), gain large value through improved maintenance operation. In our presentation, we will showcase several examples on the benefits of applying analytics to systems such as fire systems and vertical transport as well as waste monitoring and carpark access.

All these building systems provide challenges of their own. However, the experiences gained in developing root cause analytics for HVAC systems, such as tagging methods and normalization of different data sources, are transferrable to these systems so that new services can be quickly developed to provide instant value. Often the operational benefits from analytics are more important than potential energy savings or abatement of costs. As a building analytics provider, it is therefore extremely important to understand your client's true requirements and provide analytics services not only on HVAC but across a multitude of systems in the same building.