Big Data Aggregation Reducing the Costs in Urban Development.

Strategic solutions for successfully managing real estate whilst optimising ROI, operating costs, and ensuring the commercial viability of building stock remains an ongoing critical resource focus for shopping malls and hotels through to offices, hospitals, and the education sector plus others:

Progressively the low current industry sector has developed embedded devices, controllers, and other monitoring solutions at the edge of the ecosystem architecture that seek to offer a dynamic insight into the performance of the system(s) in a timely and effective manner. The vision and intent being to integrate both IoT and ICT technologies into a building, campus, or smart city’s hard and soft infrastructure to create an intelligent and collaborative ecosystem; in doing so the developers are seeking to create a socially inclusive, sustainable urban environment, intuitively sensitive to the environment and offering greater ROI for all stakeholders.

Often termed zero carbon cities or digital buildings, these empower and utilise the development of ‘green-tech hubs’ thereby facilitating ecosystems tailored around ‘urban-tech’ companies across all market sectors: education, transportation, residential, hospitality and tourism by example. The afore mentioned edge and embedded often ‘siloed’ devices in themselves collectively create and offer large volumes of disaggregate data ranging from petabytes through to zettabytes for smart cities and urban ecosystems; aggregation of this data to offer meaningful Business Intelligence BI or Operational Intelligence OI is the current challenge for IT infrastructure, service management and the property stakeholders across all verticals.

Whether managed on the premises or on cloud ‘smart digital’ buildings as they are now termed, offer low latency, and empower C suite management and operators current and relevant actionable data via consolidated views or dashboards; this siloed data and lack of connectivity has in turn sponsored the nascent growth in the use of algorithms, artificial intelligence, and interoperable API technology development using and creating predictive management of data resources through deep learning and other approaches, the latter contracting service between differing applications and governing the manner of communication using requests and responses.

The benefits of aggregated BI and OI platforms are clear, virtually any device or data source can be connected through aggregation platforms thereby offering device-side data normalisation, supporting device to server communications, localised monitoring and decision enabling buffering for higher tier server communications. In talking with management teams, they all seek the ability to gather data from the building environment, both soft and hard FM data, linked data at the enterprise across SOC and NOC along with energy management, better contractor management, improved security patrols and key management for operational excellence, reduced costs, and optimised performance curves.

A prerequisite for all digital buildings and smart enterprise architecture is the timely and effective gathering of real time actionable data in a meaningful visualisation manner or presentation format for all stakeholders that link financial performance criteria with the habitual use of buildings, people traffic patterns, assets and building performance along with security and surveillance.

Much has been said and printed about smart green field construction development, understandably, building smart, safe, or sustainable cities through interconnected buildings and collating pertinent edge and core data is substantially easier if one is starting from a green field perspective with the full collaborative engagement of all parties from the outset; there are indeed a number of such visionary projects in planning across the Middle East region; but ageing building stock currently dominates our cities with disaggregate operational functionalities and burgeoning operational cost.