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At our June Pro-Memebers' SME Workshop, two pivotal questions were answered: How and why should smart building technology and data be integrated into the building design and construction process.
Pro Members can watch the full recording, view the slides, and read the transcript here.
Mahmoud Shouman serves as division leader of JB&B's Dedicated Building Intelligence Division. He brings to the position genuine passion. I think that we'll be clear today about innovative and sustainable engineering solutions. And a proven track record of thought leadership. He works throughout the industry's major vertices applying this process to l different types of buildings, and a high level of experience across BI platforms and integrations with building systems and end-user technologies.
A few years ago, I found myself in a state-of-the-art commercial office. I walked through the entrance and the lighting adjusted automatically to dimensioned natural daylight. The elevators seemed to predict my arrival. It took me to the right floor without me even having to push a button. I was walking with the building operator, and it seemed like she had the entire building on her iPad, which was really cool. I couldn't help but notice that everything was sparkling clean. And then after I got up and I walked into the meeting room, the room recognized my presence and it flashed a welcoming note on the screen. And it adjusted the temperature and the lighting and I noticed that the AV systems were already adjusted to my preset preferences. It really felt like the meeting room was designed just for me in my presentation.
This is just one simple foundation of the absolutely remarkable potential of smart buildings.
JB&B is an engineering consulting firm that’s been around for 108 plus years. We're known for our quality designs and innovative thinking. We've been around for over a century. As you can tell we have a global presence, but obviously still looking for work in that seventh continent. Keep us posted on your Antarctica projects, please.
JB&B is well known for our MEP. The fundamentals of MEP are mechanical, electric, plumbing (M.E.P.), and fire protection engineering. Then with the advancements in technology, you start seeing AV engineering, security engineering, and others come into the fold like lighting. And then more recently, with more advancements in technology, we start seeing smart building or building intelligence engineering, which I'm very, very excited to share with you today. We're seeing environment engineering, and energy engineering (especially with loc law 97 here in New York City). We are essentially using MEP 3.0.
We are here to incorporate technology and data into the engineering design and construction process. I've broken this down into three major parts.
It's not just how it's going to be incorporated; I really want to convince you why it makes perfect sense to integrate smart building technology and data into the engineering process.
The Typical Stages of Engineering:
Remember, we said CD is where we generate ideas and concepts. And here we come up with a schematic design document. Similarly and building intelligence consulting, we're figuring out the ideas and the concepts, and the use cases and coming up with a schematic design document that includes the use cases and feasibility among other items.
Design building intelligence engineering is where we create the drawings and the specs. Similarly, just like every other discipline, we're going to provide our design development drawings and specs and construction documentation for the contractor to provide during the construction project, and then we play a bit of a supervisory role as well during contract admin.
Commissioning, again, seamless integration into the process. There's a process for contract admin and maintenance and warranty for the contractors. And similarly for building intelligence. We have the commissioning agent come in, where they test the smart building technologies and software that have been deployed and that the different systems are talking to each other properly.
This is what a typical process looks like; now we're going to add building intelligence engineering consulting to it.
During visioning and criteria, we've added a building intelligence engineer, the building intelligence design consultant. Just like the IT folks need to provide their designs, the MEP folks need to provide their designs and the building intelligence people need to provide their designs as well.
During bid/build, you've got an IT contractor, you've got an MEP contractor, and you've got an MSI (Master systems integrator) or intelligent building integrator, but really it's a smart building contractor who is responsible to deploy smart building technologies to integrate the different systems together—a very seamless addition to the process. You already have the contractors, you already have the framework, and you're simply introducing an additional line item with the existing process.
You already have the contractors, you already have the framework, and you're simply introducing an additional line item with the existing process.
Why add complexity to design and construction—additional stakeholders, and additional potential costs? Why not do it after or do it before?
You've got all the stakeholders at the table. At what point during a project do you have stakeholders from development, ops, marketing, sustainability, security, leasing, and construction, providing their input? They're providing their input during the design project because they l have some sort of stake. You have them there at the table.
We can do an entire presentation on the number of war stories that I've seen, where building intelligence comes in down the line after design or after, God forbid, construction, and an owner has to rip and replace every lock in a residential tower to make it smart-ready. Or rip out VAV controllers to IP-based controllers. Or something as simple as installing a QR reader in an elevator cabin. We're also looking at uninterrupted occupant experience if you do this during design and construction, as opposed to impacting your attendance, which is a huge nono, obviously.
You've got a schedule in place, you've got a budget, you've got project planners, you've got project managers, and you have all this structure in place that's ready to absorb a smart building initiative. You also get harmonious design—the coordination with the different vendors. An intelligent building is the integration of all the different systems together. You really want to do this at a time when you have all the MEP consultants at the table and you have all the vendors at the table and you have all the solution providers at the table and you have the contract on the table. You don't want to necessarily wait until they're gone or until all the systems are under maintenance and warranty.
I really want everybody to think of a building as a combination of systems—BMS, lighting control, elevator management, audiovisual, security, video surveillance, access control, submetering, car charging, digital twins, user apps, people counting, indoor air quality sensors, etc.
We've got these two very nice buckets. The two buckets that I'm trying to describe here: one is for priming and digital enablement. And the other one is for designing and specifying.
One bucket designed by others, we only do the priming digital enablement. For the other one, we need to provide net new—we need to provide drawings and specs.
“Think about this exercise as (and how we teach it in Nexus Foundations): what infrastructure does my use case require?” - Quote from James in the chat
We've got a before and we've got an after. The goal here: we've got a client whose pain point is “I’ve got all these screens, and it's really inefficient to operate my building. I want everything in the same place.” If you remember, when I mentioned at the very beginning when I said the operator had the entire building on her iPad when I was walking the building with her. We want to take our before into that after stage. That's the pain point.
Option 1: Prime and digitally enable BMS, security, fire alarm and EPMS. Design and Specify a Unified User Interface.
Option 2: Prime EV charging and elevator management. Design and Specify Indoor Air Quality and People Counting.
Option 3: Prime AV systems. Design and Specify Automatic Guided Vehicles.
Do dee doo doo - that's the Jeopardy theme. (This joke might be funnier in the replay video): watch it here
Correct Answer: Option 1: Prime and digitally enable BMS, security, fire alarm, and EPMS. Design and Specify a Unified User Interface.
You need to define the interfaces from the BMS, from security, from fire alarms, and from the power management system. You need to design the unit to figure out the open protocols and APIs and network considerations and metadata tags and naming and nomenclature of data points and any data points that need to be visualized on a single pane of glass or smart building platform or digital twin. And then you need to deploy and design and provide contract documents. For a single pane of glass, for a unified user interface, or for a digital twin.
The restroom on the left is cleaned on a schedule. Somebody comes in twice or three times a day, and they clean the restroom and then they leave. But there was a large meeting, it's a large conference, maybe a Building Intelligence Group event, and a lot of people showed up. A lot of people showed up at once and a lot of people showed up in the restroom, and then they left the restroom and the cleaner has no way of finding out that 20 people or, if it's Building Intelligence Group meeting, hundreds of people, just kidding, showed up in the restroom. (Oh Mahmoud, such a kidder) What we're trying to do now is introduce some sort of dynamic data-driven cleaning service based on the number of people. How can we do that? What systems need to be primed and enabled and what needs to be introduced?
Option 1: Prime and digitally enable Electronic submetering. Design and specify a digital Twin
Option 2: Prime and digitally enable lighting control. Design and Specify a user experience mobile application
Option 3: Prime and digitally enable Facilities Management system. Design and specify a people counting solution.
Correct Answer: Option 3: Prime and digitally enable Facilities Management system. Design and specify a people-counting solution.
Facilities Management software is software that the facility managers use to manage the building, That's where you would get an alert to say, hey, this restroom needs attention. Please, please go there. And what we do as building intelligence engineers is we will design and specify a people-counting solution.
There are many people counting solutions out there, whether it's radio frequency, laser, time of flight, or 3d video-based imaging, and they all have different ranges, different accuracies different costs, and different infrastructure requirements. It's a design—it's drawings and it’s specs, and it’s bids and it’s contractors. But we'll design a people-counting solution. We'll design the API Interfaces back to the FM software, and then you'll ensure your primary FM software has an open API to receive the people counting information and then based on the number of people, issue an alert to the cleaner.
And then there's obviously smart restaurant software that provides cleaners with wayfinding directions and you could get data points from the paper towels or from the soap, but we really wanted to keep it simple.
During the pandemic, we had frontline heroes, including nurses, and doctors carrying their pictures around because patients were really anxious, especially children, when a group of nurses comes in wearing a lot of masks. The functionality that we want, that we actually deployed in a previous project in a previous role of mine, is when the nurse or staff wks in, their smiling image pops up on the screen. Now it doesn't have to be a screen on the wall. It could be an integrated bedside terminal. It could be an IPTV but that's the use case here. A nurse or doctor walks in. Image shows up on the screen. Calm people's anxiety and nerves.
Option 1: Prime and digitally enable lighting control. Design and specify an indoor positioning system and IPTV.
Option 2: Prime and digitally enable WiFi distribution systems. Design and Specify an indoor positioning system and Integrated Bedside Terminal.
Option 3: Design and Specify BLE beacons infrastructure, indoor positioning and IPTV/Integrated Bedside Terminal.
Correct Answer: Any of the above.
This was a little bit of trickery, but we're trying to illustrate a point here. There are multiple ways to accomplish what the client wants and needs.
Without a strategy, you present issues. Five Ps right? Prior planning prevents poor performance.
By knowing the problems in advance, we can mitigate them accordingly. We list out challenges that are going to come and then we figure out mitigations that are needed. You need somebody that's experienced in the process. You need somebody who's experienced in the infrastructure for MEP. You need somebody that's vendor agnostic but has strong relationships with vendors. And when they do have a vendor partnership, they're upfront about it.
There's emerging tech to consider in the future. There are emerging fields like smart EV charging where the car charger adapts its charging cycle based on grid interactivity and availability of renewables. Digital twins where you have a smart building platform and you add that BIM component to it—that spatial awareness. Personal air with newer products like we talked about where you're able to control the direction and air and amount of airflow.
AI and ML obviously are on the horizon. We talked about cybersecurity and data privacy, and edge computing where you analyze data at the source and there are BI (building intelligence) use cases associated with these. And I strongly think there's going to be engineering for these fields. There's going to be cybersecurity engineering and data privacy engineering. And then last but not least, Blockchain technologies. This is where you can do secure and transparent energy trading, metering, and billing. You have those peer-to-peer energy transactions, and you can incentivize energy efficiency. These new fields may lead to MEP 4.0 even.
It's important to stay up to date because in this industry, things change really, really quickly.
Intelligence is a permanent part of the design and construction process. I want to take this opportunity to encourage everybody to continue to further explore and adopt smart building practices, you know, whether you're the owner, whether you're a content creator, like James and Rosy and the team, whether you're a consultant, an engineer, or a solution provider—keep pushing and always keep growing.
Keep pushing and always keep growing.
Remember, we said CD is where we generate ideas and concepts. And here we come up with a schematic design document. Similarly and building intelligence consulting, we're figuring out the ideas and the concepts, and the use cases and coming up with a schematic design document that includes the use cases and feasibility among other items.
Design building intelligence engineering is where we create the drawings and the specs. Similarly, just like every other discipline, we're going to provide our design development drawings and specs and construction documentation for the contractor to provide during the construction project, and then we play a bit of a supervisory role as well during contract admin.
Commissioning, again, seamless integration into the process. There's a process for contract admin and maintenance and warranty for the contractors. And similarly for building intelligence. We have the commissioning agent come in, where they test the smart building technologies and software that have been deployed and that the different systems are talking to each other properly.
This is what a typical process looks like; now we're going to add building intelligence engineering consulting to it.
During visioning and criteria, we've added a building intelligence engineer, the building intelligence design consultant. Just like the IT folks need to provide their designs, the MEP folks need to provide their designs and the building intelligence people need to provide their designs as well.
During bid/build, you've got an IT contractor, you've got an MEP contractor, and you've got an MSI (Master systems integrator) or intelligent building integrator, but really it's a smart building contractor who is responsible to deploy smart building technologies to integrate the different systems together—a very seamless addition to the process. You already have the contractors, you already have the framework, and you're simply introducing an additional line item with the existing process.
You already have the contractors, you already have the framework, and you're simply introducing an additional line item with the existing process.
Why add complexity to design and construction—additional stakeholders, and additional potential costs? Why not do it after or do it before?
You've got all the stakeholders at the table. At what point during a project do you have stakeholders from development, ops, marketing, sustainability, security, leasing, and construction, providing their input? They're providing their input during the design project because they l have some sort of stake. You have them there at the table.
We can do an entire presentation on the number of war stories that I've seen, where building intelligence comes in down the line after design or after, God forbid, construction, and an owner has to rip and replace every lock in a residential tower to make it smart-ready. Or rip out VAV controllers to IP-based controllers. Or something as simple as installing a QR reader in an elevator cabin. We're also looking at uninterrupted occupant experience if you do this during design and construction, as opposed to impacting your attendance, which is a huge nono, obviously.
You've got a schedule in place, you've got a budget, you've got project planners, you've got project managers, and you have all this structure in place that's ready to absorb a smart building initiative. You also get harmonious design—the coordination with the different vendors. An intelligent building is the integration of all the different systems together. You really want to do this at a time when you have all the MEP consultants at the table and you have all the vendors at the table and you have all the solution providers at the table and you have the contract on the table. You don't want to necessarily wait until they're gone or until all the systems are under maintenance and warranty.
I really want everybody to think of a building as a combination of systems—BMS, lighting control, elevator management, audiovisual, security, video surveillance, access control, submetering, car charging, digital twins, user apps, people counting, indoor air quality sensors, etc.
We've got these two very nice buckets. The two buckets that I'm trying to describe here: one is for priming and digital enablement. And the other one is for designing and specifying.
One bucket designed by others, we only do the priming digital enablement. For the other one, we need to provide net new—we need to provide drawings and specs.
“Think about this exercise as (and how we teach it in Nexus Foundations): what infrastructure does my use case require?” - Quote from James in the chat
We've got a before and we've got an after. The goal here: we've got a client whose pain point is “I’ve got all these screens, and it's really inefficient to operate my building. I want everything in the same place.” If you remember, when I mentioned at the very beginning when I said the operator had the entire building on her iPad when I was walking the building with her. We want to take our before into that after stage. That's the pain point.
Option 1: Prime and digitally enable BMS, security, fire alarm and EPMS. Design and Specify a Unified User Interface.
Option 2: Prime EV charging and elevator management. Design and Specify Indoor Air Quality and People Counting.
Option 3: Prime AV systems. Design and Specify Automatic Guided Vehicles.
Do dee doo doo - that's the Jeopardy theme. (This joke might be funnier in the replay video): watch it here
Correct Answer: Option 1: Prime and digitally enable BMS, security, fire alarm, and EPMS. Design and Specify a Unified User Interface.
You need to define the interfaces from the BMS, from security, from fire alarms, and from the power management system. You need to design the unit to figure out the open protocols and APIs and network considerations and metadata tags and naming and nomenclature of data points and any data points that need to be visualized on a single pane of glass or smart building platform or digital twin. And then you need to deploy and design and provide contract documents. For a single pane of glass, for a unified user interface, or for a digital twin.
The restroom on the left is cleaned on a schedule. Somebody comes in twice or three times a day, and they clean the restroom and then they leave. But there was a large meeting, it's a large conference, maybe a Building Intelligence Group event, and a lot of people showed up. A lot of people showed up at once and a lot of people showed up in the restroom, and then they left the restroom and the cleaner has no way of finding out that 20 people or, if it's Building Intelligence Group meeting, hundreds of people, just kidding, showed up in the restroom. (Oh Mahmoud, such a kidder) What we're trying to do now is introduce some sort of dynamic data-driven cleaning service based on the number of people. How can we do that? What systems need to be primed and enabled and what needs to be introduced?
Option 1: Prime and digitally enable Electronic submetering. Design and specify a digital Twin
Option 2: Prime and digitally enable lighting control. Design and Specify a user experience mobile application
Option 3: Prime and digitally enable Facilities Management system. Design and specify a people counting solution.
Correct Answer: Option 3: Prime and digitally enable Facilities Management system. Design and specify a people-counting solution.
Facilities Management software is software that the facility managers use to manage the building, That's where you would get an alert to say, hey, this restroom needs attention. Please, please go there. And what we do as building intelligence engineers is we will design and specify a people-counting solution.
There are many people counting solutions out there, whether it's radio frequency, laser, time of flight, or 3d video-based imaging, and they all have different ranges, different accuracies different costs, and different infrastructure requirements. It's a design—it's drawings and it’s specs, and it’s bids and it’s contractors. But we'll design a people-counting solution. We'll design the API Interfaces back to the FM software, and then you'll ensure your primary FM software has an open API to receive the people counting information and then based on the number of people, issue an alert to the cleaner.
And then there's obviously smart restaurant software that provides cleaners with wayfinding directions and you could get data points from the paper towels or from the soap, but we really wanted to keep it simple.
During the pandemic, we had frontline heroes, including nurses, and doctors carrying their pictures around because patients were really anxious, especially children, when a group of nurses comes in wearing a lot of masks. The functionality that we want, that we actually deployed in a previous project in a previous role of mine, is when the nurse or staff wks in, their smiling image pops up on the screen. Now it doesn't have to be a screen on the wall. It could be an integrated bedside terminal. It could be an IPTV but that's the use case here. A nurse or doctor walks in. Image shows up on the screen. Calm people's anxiety and nerves.
Option 1: Prime and digitally enable lighting control. Design and specify an indoor positioning system and IPTV.
Option 2: Prime and digitally enable WiFi distribution systems. Design and Specify an indoor positioning system and Integrated Bedside Terminal.
Option 3: Design and Specify BLE beacons infrastructure, indoor positioning and IPTV/Integrated Bedside Terminal.
Correct Answer: Any of the above.
This was a little bit of trickery, but we're trying to illustrate a point here. There are multiple ways to accomplish what the client wants and needs.
Without a strategy, you present issues. Five Ps right? Prior planning prevents poor performance.
By knowing the problems in advance, we can mitigate them accordingly. We list out challenges that are going to come and then we figure out mitigations that are needed. You need somebody that's experienced in the process. You need somebody who's experienced in the infrastructure for MEP. You need somebody that's vendor agnostic but has strong relationships with vendors. And when they do have a vendor partnership, they're upfront about it.
There's emerging tech to consider in the future. There are emerging fields like smart EV charging where the car charger adapts its charging cycle based on grid interactivity and availability of renewables. Digital twins where you have a smart building platform and you add that BIM component to it—that spatial awareness. Personal air with newer products like we talked about where you're able to control the direction and air and amount of airflow.
AI and ML obviously are on the horizon. We talked about cybersecurity and data privacy, and edge computing where you analyze data at the source and there are BI (building intelligence) use cases associated with these. And I strongly think there's going to be engineering for these fields. There's going to be cybersecurity engineering and data privacy engineering. And then last but not least, Blockchain technologies. This is where you can do secure and transparent energy trading, metering, and billing. You have those peer-to-peer energy transactions, and you can incentivize energy efficiency. These new fields may lead to MEP 4.0 even.
It's important to stay up to date because in this industry, things change really, really quickly.
Intelligence is a permanent part of the design and construction process. I want to take this opportunity to encourage everybody to continue to further explore and adopt smart building practices, you know, whether you're the owner, whether you're a content creator, like James and Rosy and the team, whether you're a consultant, an engineer, or a solution provider—keep pushing and always keep growing.
Keep pushing and always keep growing.
Remember, we said CD is where we generate ideas and concepts. And here we come up with a schematic design document. Similarly and building intelligence consulting, we're figuring out the ideas and the concepts, and the use cases and coming up with a schematic design document that includes the use cases and feasibility among other items.
Design building intelligence engineering is where we create the drawings and the specs. Similarly, just like every other discipline, we're going to provide our design development drawings and specs and construction documentation for the contractor to provide during the construction project, and then we play a bit of a supervisory role as well during contract admin.
Commissioning, again, seamless integration into the process. There's a process for contract admin and maintenance and warranty for the contractors. And similarly for building intelligence. We have the commissioning agent come in, where they test the smart building technologies and software that have been deployed and that the different systems are talking to each other properly.
This is what a typical process looks like; now we're going to add building intelligence engineering consulting to it.
During visioning and criteria, we've added a building intelligence engineer, the building intelligence design consultant. Just like the IT folks need to provide their designs, the MEP folks need to provide their designs and the building intelligence people need to provide their designs as well.
During bid/build, you've got an IT contractor, you've got an MEP contractor, and you've got an MSI (Master systems integrator) or intelligent building integrator, but really it's a smart building contractor who is responsible to deploy smart building technologies to integrate the different systems together—a very seamless addition to the process. You already have the contractors, you already have the framework, and you're simply introducing an additional line item with the existing process.
You already have the contractors, you already have the framework, and you're simply introducing an additional line item with the existing process.
Why add complexity to design and construction—additional stakeholders, and additional potential costs? Why not do it after or do it before?
You've got all the stakeholders at the table. At what point during a project do you have stakeholders from development, ops, marketing, sustainability, security, leasing, and construction, providing their input? They're providing their input during the design project because they l have some sort of stake. You have them there at the table.
We can do an entire presentation on the number of war stories that I've seen, where building intelligence comes in down the line after design or after, God forbid, construction, and an owner has to rip and replace every lock in a residential tower to make it smart-ready. Or rip out VAV controllers to IP-based controllers. Or something as simple as installing a QR reader in an elevator cabin. We're also looking at uninterrupted occupant experience if you do this during design and construction, as opposed to impacting your attendance, which is a huge nono, obviously.
You've got a schedule in place, you've got a budget, you've got project planners, you've got project managers, and you have all this structure in place that's ready to absorb a smart building initiative. You also get harmonious design—the coordination with the different vendors. An intelligent building is the integration of all the different systems together. You really want to do this at a time when you have all the MEP consultants at the table and you have all the vendors at the table and you have all the solution providers at the table and you have the contract on the table. You don't want to necessarily wait until they're gone or until all the systems are under maintenance and warranty.
I really want everybody to think of a building as a combination of systems—BMS, lighting control, elevator management, audiovisual, security, video surveillance, access control, submetering, car charging, digital twins, user apps, people counting, indoor air quality sensors, etc.
We've got these two very nice buckets. The two buckets that I'm trying to describe here: one is for priming and digital enablement. And the other one is for designing and specifying.
One bucket designed by others, we only do the priming digital enablement. For the other one, we need to provide net new—we need to provide drawings and specs.
“Think about this exercise as (and how we teach it in Nexus Foundations): what infrastructure does my use case require?” - Quote from James in the chat
We've got a before and we've got an after. The goal here: we've got a client whose pain point is “I’ve got all these screens, and it's really inefficient to operate my building. I want everything in the same place.” If you remember, when I mentioned at the very beginning when I said the operator had the entire building on her iPad when I was walking the building with her. We want to take our before into that after stage. That's the pain point.
Option 1: Prime and digitally enable BMS, security, fire alarm and EPMS. Design and Specify a Unified User Interface.
Option 2: Prime EV charging and elevator management. Design and Specify Indoor Air Quality and People Counting.
Option 3: Prime AV systems. Design and Specify Automatic Guided Vehicles.
Do dee doo doo - that's the Jeopardy theme. (This joke might be funnier in the replay video): watch it here
Correct Answer: Option 1: Prime and digitally enable BMS, security, fire alarm, and EPMS. Design and Specify a Unified User Interface.
You need to define the interfaces from the BMS, from security, from fire alarms, and from the power management system. You need to design the unit to figure out the open protocols and APIs and network considerations and metadata tags and naming and nomenclature of data points and any data points that need to be visualized on a single pane of glass or smart building platform or digital twin. And then you need to deploy and design and provide contract documents. For a single pane of glass, for a unified user interface, or for a digital twin.
The restroom on the left is cleaned on a schedule. Somebody comes in twice or three times a day, and they clean the restroom and then they leave. But there was a large meeting, it's a large conference, maybe a Building Intelligence Group event, and a lot of people showed up. A lot of people showed up at once and a lot of people showed up in the restroom, and then they left the restroom and the cleaner has no way of finding out that 20 people or, if it's Building Intelligence Group meeting, hundreds of people, just kidding, showed up in the restroom. (Oh Mahmoud, such a kidder) What we're trying to do now is introduce some sort of dynamic data-driven cleaning service based on the number of people. How can we do that? What systems need to be primed and enabled and what needs to be introduced?
Option 1: Prime and digitally enable Electronic submetering. Design and specify a digital Twin
Option 2: Prime and digitally enable lighting control. Design and Specify a user experience mobile application
Option 3: Prime and digitally enable Facilities Management system. Design and specify a people counting solution.
Correct Answer: Option 3: Prime and digitally enable Facilities Management system. Design and specify a people-counting solution.
Facilities Management software is software that the facility managers use to manage the building, That's where you would get an alert to say, hey, this restroom needs attention. Please, please go there. And what we do as building intelligence engineers is we will design and specify a people-counting solution.
There are many people counting solutions out there, whether it's radio frequency, laser, time of flight, or 3d video-based imaging, and they all have different ranges, different accuracies different costs, and different infrastructure requirements. It's a design—it's drawings and it’s specs, and it’s bids and it’s contractors. But we'll design a people-counting solution. We'll design the API Interfaces back to the FM software, and then you'll ensure your primary FM software has an open API to receive the people counting information and then based on the number of people, issue an alert to the cleaner.
And then there's obviously smart restaurant software that provides cleaners with wayfinding directions and you could get data points from the paper towels or from the soap, but we really wanted to keep it simple.
During the pandemic, we had frontline heroes, including nurses, and doctors carrying their pictures around because patients were really anxious, especially children, when a group of nurses comes in wearing a lot of masks. The functionality that we want, that we actually deployed in a previous project in a previous role of mine, is when the nurse or staff wks in, their smiling image pops up on the screen. Now it doesn't have to be a screen on the wall. It could be an integrated bedside terminal. It could be an IPTV but that's the use case here. A nurse or doctor walks in. Image shows up on the screen. Calm people's anxiety and nerves.
Option 1: Prime and digitally enable lighting control. Design and specify an indoor positioning system and IPTV.
Option 2: Prime and digitally enable WiFi distribution systems. Design and Specify an indoor positioning system and Integrated Bedside Terminal.
Option 3: Design and Specify BLE beacons infrastructure, indoor positioning and IPTV/Integrated Bedside Terminal.
Correct Answer: Any of the above.
This was a little bit of trickery, but we're trying to illustrate a point here. There are multiple ways to accomplish what the client wants and needs.
Without a strategy, you present issues. Five Ps right? Prior planning prevents poor performance.
By knowing the problems in advance, we can mitigate them accordingly. We list out challenges that are going to come and then we figure out mitigations that are needed. You need somebody that's experienced in the process. You need somebody who's experienced in the infrastructure for MEP. You need somebody that's vendor agnostic but has strong relationships with vendors. And when they do have a vendor partnership, they're upfront about it.
There's emerging tech to consider in the future. There are emerging fields like smart EV charging where the car charger adapts its charging cycle based on grid interactivity and availability of renewables. Digital twins where you have a smart building platform and you add that BIM component to it—that spatial awareness. Personal air with newer products like we talked about where you're able to control the direction and air and amount of airflow.
AI and ML obviously are on the horizon. We talked about cybersecurity and data privacy, and edge computing where you analyze data at the source and there are BI (building intelligence) use cases associated with these. And I strongly think there's going to be engineering for these fields. There's going to be cybersecurity engineering and data privacy engineering. And then last but not least, Blockchain technologies. This is where you can do secure and transparent energy trading, metering, and billing. You have those peer-to-peer energy transactions, and you can incentivize energy efficiency. These new fields may lead to MEP 4.0 even.
It's important to stay up to date because in this industry, things change really, really quickly.
Intelligence is a permanent part of the design and construction process. I want to take this opportunity to encourage everybody to continue to further explore and adopt smart building practices, you know, whether you're the owner, whether you're a content creator, like James and Rosy and the team, whether you're a consultant, an engineer, or a solution provider—keep pushing and always keep growing.
Keep pushing and always keep growing.
At our June Pro-Memebers' SME Workshop, two pivotal questions were answered: How and why should smart building technology and data be integrated into the building design and construction process.
Pro Members can watch the full recording, view the slides, and read the transcript here.
Mahmoud Shouman serves as division leader of JB&B's Dedicated Building Intelligence Division. He brings to the position genuine passion. I think that we'll be clear today about innovative and sustainable engineering solutions. And a proven track record of thought leadership. He works throughout the industry's major vertices applying this process to l different types of buildings, and a high level of experience across BI platforms and integrations with building systems and end-user technologies.
A few years ago, I found myself in a state-of-the-art commercial office. I walked through the entrance and the lighting adjusted automatically to dimensioned natural daylight. The elevators seemed to predict my arrival. It took me to the right floor without me even having to push a button. I was walking with the building operator, and it seemed like she had the entire building on her iPad, which was really cool. I couldn't help but notice that everything was sparkling clean. And then after I got up and I walked into the meeting room, the room recognized my presence and it flashed a welcoming note on the screen. And it adjusted the temperature and the lighting and I noticed that the AV systems were already adjusted to my preset preferences. It really felt like the meeting room was designed just for me in my presentation.
This is just one simple foundation of the absolutely remarkable potential of smart buildings.
JB&B is an engineering consulting firm that’s been around for 108 plus years. We're known for our quality designs and innovative thinking. We've been around for over a century. As you can tell we have a global presence, but obviously still looking for work in that seventh continent. Keep us posted on your Antarctica projects, please.
JB&B is well known for our MEP. The fundamentals of MEP are mechanical, electric, plumbing (M.E.P.), and fire protection engineering. Then with the advancements in technology, you start seeing AV engineering, security engineering, and others come into the fold like lighting. And then more recently, with more advancements in technology, we start seeing smart building or building intelligence engineering, which I'm very, very excited to share with you today. We're seeing environment engineering, and energy engineering (especially with loc law 97 here in New York City). We are essentially using MEP 3.0.
We are here to incorporate technology and data into the engineering design and construction process. I've broken this down into three major parts.
It's not just how it's going to be incorporated; I really want to convince you why it makes perfect sense to integrate smart building technology and data into the engineering process.
The Typical Stages of Engineering:
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