What constitutes a smart building?
Digital transformation of property and construction industries “extremely slow” – but there may be a solution, says Beckhoff
Beckhoff says despite the serious emissions challenges faced by the property and construction industries, the digital transformation of both industries is occurring extremely slowly.
While the debate has raged on as to what constitutes a smart building, Beckhoff believes too many building projects have got the approach to creating a smart building all wrong.
Karl Walker, Market Development Manager at Beckhoff UK, said: “The past decade has seen technology in buildings take huge leaps forward, resulting in more efficient spaces through connected systems. However, these connections are typically made in a point-to-point fashion, making changing or upgrading systems difficult and expensive. These deployments can’t easily facilitate data extraction or analysis either and certainly don’t support industry demands for self-optimising buildings enabled by machine learning.”
Beckhoff believes the way forward is to begin with the end in mind, taking into account who is going to be using the building and what they are going to be doing there.
With this in mind, Vanti, a Beckhoff UK Integration Partner, is developing Smart Core, a building technology platform and framework designed to standardise the approach people take to integrating systems and make it much more sustainable for the future. After Smart Core has been deployed, clients with the requisite skills can continue to make changes as and when required.
The work produced by the Smart Core Foundation will be freely available under a Creative Commons licence to those who wish to use it and anyone making enhancements to it also has to release their work under the same terms.
www.beckhoff.co.uk/building
