The Integration Challenge of Smart Buildings

For July’s APAC Member Gathering Tyrone Mawing, Asset Technology Manager of Mirvac presented on the “Integration Challenge of Smart Buildings” and, along with the Pro Members in attendance, debated whether or not all buildings should eventually have an Integrated Communications Network (ICN), Independent Data Layer (IDL) & an Integrated Building Platform (IBP)? (no acronyms were harmed in the making of this title)

Mirvac is a leading development and management property group, specialising in residential, retail, office & industrial and build to rent sectors with circa $35 billion of assets under management. For more information on Mirvac go to the following link https://www.mirvac.com/ 

Mirvac are one of the pioneering developers of smart buildings in Australia and have been evolving their smart building strategy over many years. Mirvac is one of the few landlords that have had a crack at defining what a smart building is.  They have defined it as “a building that rapidly responds to the evolving needs of our customers”.  I like this definition as it succinctly describes the philosophy of what a smart building should deliver for the key stakeholder - the end customer.

At a recent new-build development project, Mirvac delivered an Integrated Building Platform (IBP) for a key anchor tenant in Brisbane.  

For those who are unfamiliar with the term Integrated Building Platform (IBP), it can best be described as a platform which visualises data from all connected devices, across all OT systems, in a single user interface.  The IBP allows users to trend any data point, create visualisations, and build alarms however they see fit.  Whether you’re a believer or not - this is the single pane of glass platform that is often discussed and debated at length across the Nexus community.

A high-level architecture of an IBP can be seen below;

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The IBP that Mirvac delivered gave the anchor tenant access to all the OT data and insights they could get their hands on, and importantly, they had requested be delivered at the start of the project.  In order to enable the IBP to be built, there firstly needed to be an Integrated Communications Network (ICN) which allowed the IBP to discover all the connected devices and data points across all OT systems.  

In the specific scenario, the tenant was the anchor tenant for the building, leasing the vast majority of the buildings net lettable area (NLA).  The anchor tenant had a very specific technology brief which the landlord needed to meet in order to secure their lease and ultimately build the development.

The driving equation here is a simple one;

Tenant wanted = landlord delivered

But is this driver applicable to all buildings? 

The vast majority of commercial real estate is comprised of buildings with multiple tenants.  Multiple tenants that have different needs, drivers, and budgets to play with.  ICN’s, IDL’s, IBP’s and other modern technologies come at a significant cost to build and maintain, so before going down the path of building these things we need to understand what value they’ll deliver for the end customer and is it fit-for-purpose for the asset?  

And who’s to say that even once it’s all built that tenants will be happy paying the bill to keep these systems maintained.  With complexity comes cost and not all tenants may want to pay for a big mac, coke and fries….perhaps a cheeseburger will do for some.  

Let’s zoom in on the challenge of delivering just an ICN on an existing building with siloed networks.

As Pro Member Jon Clarke aptly describes, most OT networks in existing buildings “resemble wet string with a couple of switches”.  Many will argue he’s being kind!  To go from the current state of OT networks, to an ICN grade base-building network with all sub-systems converged, requires significant investment and careful planning.  In the current economic environment where Capex is becoming harder to ascertain, and landlords are contending with unprecedented challenges, are ICN’s worth pursuing on existing buildings?

Tyrone presented one way that Mirvac is approaching the challenge of delivering ICN’s in the current environment.  Their approach is to converge major technology upgrade projects into a single project.  E.g. if a BMS upgrade is scheduled for 3 years time, and a CCTV upgrade is scheduled for 5 years time, consider pushing back the BMS upgrade by 2 years to align with the CCTV upgrade and use this as the trigger point to create an ICN grade base-building network.  

This approach allows Mirvac to align and consolidate capital expenditure across key end-of-life projects, which provides the opportunity to create an ICN at little to no additional cost compared to the cost of upgrading each system individually - a clear ROI for the landlord.  

Even in challenging economic periods, landlords are still required to deliver end-of-life system replacements to ensure the building operates appropriately and delivers the required level of amenity for tenants. If money is going to be spent regardless, then design teams can leverage these key points in time to start improving the base-building network and delivering an ICN. The ICN is the foundational building block of any smart building and without it an IDL, IBP and many other smart building applications cannot be enabled.