Page 40 - RC21 EDGE Summer Issue

Business Solutions
INTEGRATING SIMULATION INTO AN OPEN-INTEGRATED DATA PLATFORM
THE TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGY TODAY enable building owners to reach very low energy and healthy building performance without spending a premium in construction costs. Fuel poverty, inequitable indoor air quality, pandemics, and poor outdoor air quality demand that
we change the way we look at buildings. Irrespective of the motivation, high performance buildings are rapidly becoming table stakes in the discussion of sustainability or sustainable development.
Experienced building owners have figured out that align- ing the financial, social, and environmental goals of sus- tainable buildings is best achieved by integrating building science and data science, using key components of the data infrastructure that we will outline in this article.
Building Science versus Data Science
Building science, for the purposes of this analysis, refers to Passive House buildings, which represents the highest performing buildings based on building science before introducing renewables. The Natural Order of Sustainability is an envelope-first energy and indoor air quality meth- odology for new and existing buildings of Passive First
– Active Second – Renewables Last. The Natural Order of Sustainability is an organic pathway to reach zero energy consumption and the healthiest of indoor environmental conditions. Building science is represented by simulations from physics-based sustainability modeling.
Data science delivers smart buildings which “use tech- nology to assess and improve the performance of build- ings.” Data from Operational Technologies (OT) provide building owners greater control and a deeper understand- ing of space utilization, energy consumption, security, and environmental and maintenance needs.
Merging Sciences to Deliver Building Performance
To merge building science and data science requires that we standardize the real-time time-series data historian and extract data from OTs in the most cost effective and reliable manner possible.
Building owners today are choosing “open integration” networks and controls in lieu of proprietary systems. This one move creates a single platform for all the OTs across building(s) enabling easier and cheaper access to building performance data. In this scenario, the minimum viable smart building infrastructure is an operational
Common Operational Technologies (OT)
Building Management System (Controls), RESET Air IAQ/OAQ, Weather Station, Utility Energy and Water Metering, Security/ Access Control/CCTV, Density Analytics/Occupancy & Vacancy Controls, Lighting Control, Fire Alarm, Elevator, Generator, PV Array, Enterprise Networks (Telephone, Data, Wi-Fi), etc.
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whole-building performance model, primary-source utility meters, indoor air quality sensors and a JACE network controller.
Smart Building Data Infrastructure
For building owners and developers to choose to invest in open integration, they must believe they will get an appropriate return on investment. In that regard, we find it helpful to breakdown the discussion into four critical components of Smart Building Infrastructure.
Early innovators in each of the areas below were pioneers in their fields. In many cases bringing a component solution to the market required a multi-faceted,