BUILDING SERVICES
The rise of self-driving buildings Jordan O’Brien, contributing editor for Electrical Review, discovers how AI and machine learning is creating a new breed of smart buildings.
he world is going nuts over self-driving cars and their ability to make your life easier, but the reality is, we’re still a long way off from buying cars that do away with human drivers altogether. That’s why we should be concentrating on self-driving buildings instead, a technology that is very much already with us. It might sound crazy to call it a ‘self-driving building’, because the building is of course stationary, and not ‘driving’ anywhere. However, what I mean by that phrase is a building that uses AI and automation to adapt on the fly without needing any user input. It’s building automation on steroids. Companies such as Schneider Electric, Silicon Valley start-up, Verdigris Technologies, and German automation firm, Dabbel, are
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20 Electrical Review | December 2019
already rolling out solutions that leverage AI, and are using the Internet of Things to better inform a central building automation system and to teach it when to act without any user input. Electrical Review spoke to Emilie Hung, solutions architect at Verdigris, to get a better understanding on what a ‘self-driving building’ could be. What are the advantages of adaptive automation over traditional building automation? “Traditional building automation systems are not intelligent. They are based on simple feedback loops and can be binary. The controls are programmed based on a few static inputs, design conditions, and often are not re-programmed after a building is commissioned. In this scenario,