Smart buildings: The need for building control solutions and automated building systems today today

When it comes to building control solutions, most corporations see the need for it in their own buildings and infrastructures; though the creation of smart buildings and their many heavy uses were initially intended for public use. It is the hope of many countries that making it a norm among corporations will steadily prompt their general populace to even adopt it as a necessity.

With the other half of the world’s global population residing in cities and urbanisation at a rapidly increasing pace every year, buildings and cities themselves require an evolution of housing people and sustaining themselves with the declining state of the world. This concern is how automated building systems were conceived, with major cities already turning intelligent building control into a common sight for their civilians.

Governments have implemented their own initiatives towards creating and sustaining their own smart cities, from Singapore to Helsinki and Zurich as part of The Paris Agreement that was adopted back in 2015 as part of the treaty on climate change and mitigation.

Smart buildings have various upgrades to them that can range from smart lighting controllers, building automation, making cities safer, smarter, and sustainable by letting them control their own energy usage.

With automated building systems on the rise, thousands of buildings and homes have been consuming energy more efficiently rather than depending on manual maneuvers. Such an example of making use of these building control solutions is the Headquarters of New Development Bank (NDB) in Shanghai has its own integrated building control system to handle indoor lighting, electric curtains and windows that make use of 8,000 control circuits.

Installations can be a pause and hold back on progress for some time, but the benefit smart buildings have is on the long-run of energy savings - with an increased 15% of saved energy compared to conventional means.

For the nearing end of 2021 and entering into 2022, we’re still in that turning point of collectively lessening our emissions and saving energy with attempts to convert into renewable energies such as solar panels, power grids, and even electric-run vehicles that are steadily increasing in normality. Adopting automated building systems in intelligent buildings to then form full-on smart cities can only add on to these attempts to improve the current landscape of our world.

Building control solutions is only one step to developing more opportunities for our society. As new technological processes produce more concepts and solutions, there will certainly be another step that needs to be taken once we’ve accomplished smart structures as being the common practice of our cities - with the next step to be connective and truly make use of our intelligent buildings and even introducing a new level of intelligence that can aid our future generations.

The author is a blogger and helps to create intelligent environments. He specialises in designing and creating innovative building control systems.