How IoT and AI can raise the performance and awareness of FM

All areas and departments of a company are in constant evolution, the tools they use are constantly evolving and new technologies are constantly brought in to improve performance and effectiveness.

Whenever performance is required, sensors are being incorporated, data is being collected and analyzed and changes are happening in real time. Electric cars have hundreds of sensors, planes have tens of thousands of sensors, and the data from these sensors is used to constantly improve their operation performance and the comfort of their occupants.

How about our buildings?

Most of our buildings are built using standards that are obsolete, as an example, ASHRAE’s ventilation requirements for our buildings have not changed much in over 50 years (Janssen, n.d.), and these standards don’t take into account a building as a “living organism”, one that changes constantly and requires different needs as people go in or out, as external weather and pollution levels change, etc.

The protocols that most of our devices use (Modbus and Bacnet) were invented over 30 years ago (RTA, n.d.), how many 30-year-old devices do you think your electric car has? Can you imagine your IT department using servers or laptops developed in the 1970s?

Evolving Facility Management

Dr. Joseph Allen, from Harvard University stated “Your building manager has a greater impact on your health than your personal doctor” (Allen, n.d.). An uncontestable statement, knowing that most of us spend 8-10 hours in our office every day and 80-90% of our 4me indoors.

This raises a question that all FM managers need to ask themselves: Are you focusing more time on the infrastructure or the organization’s employees? Deep inside most FM will answer that they are focusing on infrastructure, and this is what needs to change, fast.

But how can Facility Management truly help without the right tools?

I often ask the following questions to the FM teams I speak to about the real estate assets they manage. How many of these can you answer with a solid YES?

- Do you know the formaldehyde levels in your office in this moment?
- Do you know the PM2.5 levels in your office in this moment?
- Do the occupants of our building know if their workspace it is 100% safe?
- Is your building adapting (turning equipment on and off) to all these parameters in real time?
- Do you know how many people are in all different areas of your office at any point in time?
- Is your office adjusting ventilation, air condi4oning and lighting according to the occupancy of the building?
- Is your building aware of outdoor parameters like temperature and pollution and adapting automatically to keep perfect indoor comfort and protect its infrastructure?

And finally, if you did not answer YES to all these questions, what do we need to do to start having a performing real estate asset? One that can adapt in real time, helping us create a healthy building while drastically reducing energy consumption?

Understanding the current situation

The first step towards solving an issue is to understand the issue, and in order to do that in a building, just like in cars or planes, sensors will be our best friend.

We will need to understand several parameters depending on what we want to achieve:

- Air quality & Thermal comfort: A healthy building starts with knowing that the air we are breathing is healthy, and to do that, we need to install air quality sensors that will be able to let us know about several parameters, at least, particulate mafer (PM2.5), chemicals (TVOC), CO2, temperature and humidity.
- Occupation: At least we need to know if an area is occupied or not, an additional, more expensive option would consist of understanding how many people are in that area.
- Light: Being able to know whether external light is sufficient will allow us to make important energy savings decisions, and will let us know if our occupants are in a space that is healthy for their eyes since depending on the task that needs to be performed, different light intensities are required.

There is additional sensing equipment that can be added (Water quality, noise levels, etc.) but let’s leave those for a second step.

These sensors will already provide us vital information about the healthiness of a space and will additionally show us where our issues might be, let’s see some examples:

Space Utilization:



The above 2 images already offer us a lot of valuable information and generate several questions and opportunities to improve our energy efficiency:

Image 1 shows us that there are 3 areas that are not occupied, could we automatically change light intensity or turn lights off in those areas? Is our AC and ventilation systems providing air to those areas? What can we do to help keep perfect health while reducing energy consumption?

Image 2 shows us that the monitored area is only used 50% of the time during working hours, is this acceptable use rate? Can we do something to all the HVAC / lighting devices in that area to save energy during that 50% of the time? Are lights on during the time that area is unoccupied?

What is the current air quality in an area of our office:


Images 3 shows that currently all air quality parameters are perfect, and that the space is occupied, images 3 and 4 additionally show all indoor air quality historical information for that area showing also working and non-working hours. Drilling down in the CO2 levels, we can see that with the current setup, levels in this area are 100% of the time in compliance with customer requirement (no red bars) and that only sometimes they go into the “yellow”.

During all the time that this area has perfect air quality levels, could we reduce or shut down ventilation at times? Shujng ventilation down would help us reduce air condi4oning needs, help us protect and lengthen the life to our filters, our ventilation and air conditioning systems, reducing not only energy consumption, but also environmental impact, equipment purchasing costs, maintenance cost and personnel cost… Sounds like a no brainer!

The next item that we need to incorporate is power meters, which will help us understand not only what energy we use, but how we use it:

And once we have all this information, the magic of data begins, we can combine all this information to help us really understand how to improve our facility and how to go to the next step: Automation.

How do we combine this information?

Let’s look at a couple examples:

Let’s dig deeper into the CEO office that we can see on the top right corner in image 1:

Energy Details

Let’s look at the Energy details for just a second:

This quick analysis will tell us many things that will make us think:
1. We can see that, in this moment, air conditioning, lights and outlets are all on and they are consuming energy, but the space is unoccupied already for over 1 hour, does this mean we already wasted 1 hour of energy both in AC and lighting? Most likely yes.
2. The row of pie charts shows that AC is on during 90% of the time, lights are on during 96% of the time and outlets are using power almost permanently during working hours, but our CEO seems to be using this space only 35% of the time, what if we could save some energy during the remaining 65% of the time?
3. And since our power sensors are measuring energy consumption, we can very quickly see how the above could actually convert to energy savings.


Ventilation Details


Going back, let’s check on ventilation details also from the above menu:

A quick analysis based on collected data will be able to tell us some very valuable information about this same area:
1. First, the system will tell us that indoor air quality parameters are perfect, and therefore there is no need for fresh air in this space currently, so we could just go ahead and shut it down until conditions change, furthermore, the space is currently unoccupied.
2. We can see all main parameters (CO2, humidity, chemicals, and PM levels) within our requirements, so shujng down ventilation should not be an issue for health concerns.
3. Additionally, the system will look at internal and external parameters, for example, we can see that the temperature outside is 15 degrees higher than the indoor target level, this means that we need to cool the fresh air by 15 degrees, pujng additional stress in the AC. The immediate question, should we do this for a space that is unoccupied and has perfect air quality? Correct. Answer is no.
4. We can also see the impact on our filtration infrastructure, in this case impact is low since difference between indoor and outdoor PM is not high.
5. The bofom row of the image shows that based on the analysis done automatically by the system, our ventilation is on for 12 hours every day, the space is occupied only 3 and a half hours a day but according to the air quality parameters, we would only need ventilation in this space for a bit over 1 hour a day, the potential savings in over 90%!

ESG, the ultimate metric

ESG is becoming a mandatory metric, unsatisfactory ESG scores will impact an organization ability to obtain loans from banks, operate with certain suppliers and customers, and will expose the company to penalties, facility management is the single, most qualified driver, to achieve perfect scores in the E in ESG by using the above-mentioned tools.

Looking at the last item in that menu, we can pullup at any time the real time ESG score for each area and each location:

Image 8 shows that before automation we have energy consumption issues in this space especially in HVAC and lighting, therefore we can very quickly identify and start focusing on the areas that have a higher impact in our ESG report and our energy consumption.

Conclusion. Adding value to the corporation

All this information changes the way Facilities Management team can take control of the infrastructure, looking at it from the employee side, rather than from the equipment side, creating perfect working environment while significantly reducing energy consumption, using predictive algorithms, machine learning, alerts and automation to stop worrying about the equipment and put the focus on the needs of the employee, the most important asset of any organization.

Through all these actions, by improving the working environment and working conditions, and reducing costs, FM will create direct, real and measurable contribution to the organization by:

- Increasing employee productivity.
- Improving employee retention.
- Improving talent acquisition.
- Improving employee loyalty.
- Becoming the first line of defense against sick leaves and absenteeism.
- Improve ESG scores, saving costly penal4es and allowing the organiza4on access to cheaper financing.
- Reduce overall real estate operating costs, having a direct impact on the organization’s EBIT.

In the next articles, we will start drilling down into automation and how to turn all this knowledge into real savings and impact for the organization and also how facility management is already playing a major role in the lease contract negotiations and space design.



About Nevegy

Nevegy is an Environmental Technology company that develops technological solu4ons to improve real estate asset value by improving asset’s sustainability and occupant’s well-being. Ensuring a healthy indoor environment while reducing overall energy consump4on through automa4on, IoT and AI algorithms, reducing energy costs and helping customers achieve ESG goals.

Bibliography

Janssen, J. E. (n.d.). ASHRAE - THe history of ven4la4on and temperature control. Retrieved from ASHRAE

Journals:

h

%20History/The-History-of-VenMlaMon-and-Temperature-Control.pdf

RTA. (n.d.). RTA - History of Modbus. Retrieved from RTA - History of Modbus:

h

Allen, D. J. (n.d.). An interview with Dr. Joseph Allen - LinkedIn. Retrieved from Wikipeda:

h