Intelligent Building Characteristics (17 points)

There have been many definitions of IBI made during the last 20 years.

Intelligent building definition: (Per Christiansson 10.2000)

Intelligent buildings are buildings that through their physical design and IT installations are responsive, flexible and adaptive to changing needs from its users and the organisations that inhabit the building during it's life time. The building will supply services for its inhabitants, its administration and operation & maintenance. The intelligent building will accomplish transparent 'intelligent' behaviour, have state memory, support human and installation systems communication, and be equipped with sensors and actuators.

The IBI will possess some important characteristics

  1. be flexible and responsive to different usage and environmental contexts such as office, home, hotel, and industry invoking different kinds of loads from nature, people, and building systems,

  2. be able to change states (clearly defined) with respect to functions and user demands over time and building spaces (easy to program and re-program during use)

  3. support human communication (between individuals and groups)

  4. provide transparent intelligenceand be simple and understandable to the users (support ubiquitous computers and networks)

  5. have a distributed long term and short term memory

  6. contain tenant, O&M, and administration service systems

  7. support introduction of new (sometimes not yet defined) services

  8. be equipped with sensors (stationary and mobile) for direct or indirect input and manipulation of signals from users, systems and the building structure

  9. be equipped with actuators for direct or indirect manipulation installatations and the building structure

  10. accomplish 'intelligent' behaviour (self diagnosis, trigger actions on certain events and even learn from use)

  11. integrate different IBI systems to form complex systems

  12. contain IBI life time standardized solutions as far as possible

  13. be well document (in 3D with functional descriptions) available in Virtual Reality with physical structure overlay

  14. provide canalization (information roads) that shall house 'wires' carrying new services

  15. be able to handle high band width information transfer.

  16. provide dynamic secure information domains (i.e not based on a non-routed Ethernet in a residential block)

  17. be open to efficient communication between applications based on for example XML implementations (Christiansson 1998), and platform independent solutions as Jini on Java Virtual Machines, (see http://www.sun.com/jini)



©Per Christiansson, 31.10.2000 [1.2.2000]