Panel discussion on “SMART CONNECTED INTELLIGENT BUILDINGS – THE FOUNDATION FOR SMART CITIES”

Sameer Pradhan, ControlTrends India recently moderated an engaging and riveting panel discussion on “SMART CONNECTED INTELLIGENT BUILDINGS – THE FOUNDATION FOR SMART CITIES”, organised by ISHRAE Ahmedabad Chapter as part of ACREX 2017 Roadshow. The discussion weaved the technology side of Smart Cities with the Smart Connected Intelligent Building systems.

The distinguished panel comprised of Mr. U.D Dharmadhikari, Head Engineering GIFT City, Gujarat, Mr. Prasad Patil Director SECONA, Mr. Ashwin Ijantkar, Director Epsilon Design Consultants, Ashish Khare, Head SI business- India and ME, Wipro Limited and A.Skandaprasad, Customer Marketing leader, Honeywell Automation India Ltd.

Key note speaker Mr. Sudhir Krishna,Chairman, Delhi State Finance Commission and Key member of Smart Cities Council of India gave the gathering his insights about Smart Cities implementation.

In his opening note, Sameer Pradhan said, “The Smart City is not just an abstract vision of urban utopia; it is here, and it is here to stay. The grand promise is that the Internet of Things will help us iron out inefficiencies, using insights generated from Big Data to transform urban life. It promises to improve quality of life and manage the complex systems that make up the city’s infrastructure”.

The panel emphasised that a smart city uses information and communication technology (ICT) to enhance its liveability, workability and sustainability. The smart cities framework captures this relationship between a city’s responsibilities (what it needs to accomplish for citizens) and its enablers (the smart technologies that can make those tasks easier).
It does 3 jobs –collecting, communicating and crunching.

1. Collecting data – from smart devices logically located throughout the city and measures and monitors it. For instance, smart meters that can measure, water and gas usage, smart traffic sensors that report road conditions and congestion. Smart gps gear can pinpoint exact location of city buses or whereabouts of emergency crews. And the smart phones carried by city dwellers are also sensors which collect information about their position and where they cluster at different times of the day.
2. Communicating data – once you have collected a data you need to send it along. Smart cities use wired and wireless communication pathways from fibre optic to cellular to cable. The objective is to have connectivity everywhere, to every person and to every device.
3. Crunching data – after collecting and communicating the data you analyze it for presenting, perfecting and predicting.

If you have read about “Big Data” or “Analytics”, you may already know astonishing things that can be done by crunching large amount of data so that information turns into intelligence helping people and machines to act and make better decisions.

Presenting Information: tells us what is going on right now which also called “situational awareness”. Software monitors the huge flow of incoming data, then summarizes and visualizes it in a way that makes it easy for human operators to understand for example a smart operations centre can monitor all aspects of an emergency situations including the actions and locations of police, fire, ambulances, traffic, downed powelines, closed streets and much more.

Perfecting: operations uses the power of computers to optimize complex systems for example managing supply and demand on electricity networks on synchronized lines to minimize energy usage of an entire high rise to achieve maximum confort and minimum cost.

Predicting: what is perhaps the most exciting part of predicting is “analytics”. Cities such as Singapore already crunch data to predict traffic jams while there is still time to minimize their effects. Cities rio de generio already predict where flooding will occur from a particular storm so emergency crews and evacuation teams know where to go.
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The discussion took a deeper dive into the technology enablers and came to the topic of intelligent buildings. A range of topics starting from defining smart cities to defining open BMS systems, role of skilling, etc were deliberated in great detail.

The panel unanimously agreed that from a Smart City standpoint, an Intelligent Building must be
– IPcentric and deliver
• True openness
• Interoperability
• Integration
The ability to connect, integrate with multiple and disparate systems as well as over large building portfolios.
• Support edge-to-enterprise architecture
• Cyber secured
Today’s BMS systems are vulnerable to cyber attacks. You will agree that cyber attacks cane be one of the most damaging business disrupters.
• Data and analytics
• IOT

An audience of 150 people left educated and wanting for more..

ControlTrends India thanks Mr. Pankaj Dharkar, National President FSAI, Mr. Sunil Maheshwari, President ISHRAE, Mr. Ashish Rakheja, Chairman ACREX2017, and the entire team of ISHRAE Ahmedabad Chapter for presenting this opportunity to us.