IoT for smart buildings - long awaited revolution or lean evolution Marcin Bajer ABB Corporate Research Center Starowi´ slna 13a 31-038 Kraków, Poland Email: marcin.bajer@pl.abb.com Abstract—It is expected that popularization of smart building technology will redefine the way we work and live in the future. Energy used in buildings represents significant part of global energy consumption and humans spend most of the time indoors. Even now, using proven and commercially available technology, it is possible to achieve significant reduction in building mainte- nance costs and energy consumption providing more comfortable living environment at the same time. Nevertheless, the promise of intelligent buildings extends far beyond energy efficiency or housing comfort. Together with concept of Internet of Things it may change the world more than the Internet did. Will it be so? How this process will look like? What are potential threats? This paper will briefly cover current trends in building automation systems and try to answer all those questions. It will focus both on currently implemented solutions, mainly from ABB portfolio, as well as on potential disruptive technologies that will shape the future of intelligent buildings. ∗ I. I NTRODUCTION Currently, over half of the world’s population lives in urban areas, it is expected by 2050, this coefficient will grown to 66 per cent [1]. The coming decades will bring changes in the way space and buildings are developed and used. Land shortage leads to a tendency to construct taller buildings and dig for space underground. Such buildings exploit the land, but have the negative effects in the environment and create new prob- lems including increasing population congestion, pollution, reduce citizen access to fresh air and sunligh [2]. Those factors will be important drivers for the evolution of smart buildings. Urbanization and shortage of natural resources requires build- ing owners and the government to take responsibility not only for building maintenance and operations, but also to care for such things as sustainability, energy management, pollution or livability. To address new challenges construction industry must apply latest advances in technology (new materials, IT solutions) as well as improvements for health and well-being of people. II. SMART BUILDING DEFINITION Unfortunately, there is no common definition of smart building. Existing definitions focus on three major features of smart buildings: ∗ Publication is based on keynote speech lead by Marcin Bajer on 23rd International Workshop of the European Group for Intelligent Computing in Engineering June 29th – July 1st, 2016, Kraków, Poland Lights HVAC Air quality Energy management Renovables Security Garden Multimedia Roller blinds Surveillance Internet Fire alarm Management consoles for individual subsystems a) Traditional building b) Intelligent building c) IoT based building Lights HVAC Air quality Energy management Renovables Security Garden Multimedia Roller blinds Surveillance Internet Fire alarm Multifunction management consoles Big Data Analytics Artificial Intelligence Storage Visualization Predicitve maitenance Machine Learning Lights HVAC Air quality Energy management Renovables Security Garden Multimedia Roller blinds Surveillance Internet Fire alarm Multifunction management consoles Fig. 1. Regular vs. Intelligent building (base on [4]) • Reduction of building operation and maintenance costs, • Improvement of health, satisfaction and well-being of building users, • Minimization of building environmental impact (not only by the reduction of energy/water consumption or waste production, but also by sustainable architecture), Of course, there are many different types of buildings, each type has its own specific characteristics, but to some extend, most of the considerations discussed in this text can be applied to all of them. The core part of each smart building is Building Automation System (also known as Building Manage- ment System). It controls controls and monitors the building’s mechanical and electrical equipment such as ventilation, light- ing, power systems, fire systems, and security systems [3]. In traditional building, those subsystems operates separately and communication between them is limited (Figure 1a). If data remains solely contained within the boundary of the original subsystem it can not be fully utilized. Those so called informa- tion silos are typically operated by a unique, vendor specific software system which additionally makes them difficult to manage and maintain. Moreover, it is common that, due to the lack of integration, various subsystems duplicates the same sensors. Smart buildings use information technology to connect variety of subsystems in the way those subsystems can share the information to optimize total building performance. The communication between particular subsystems is more often standardized. Data integration in smart buildings goes beyond the equipment installed within building four walls. Smart buildings interact with IT systems of utilities providers or