Smart operational technologies programming for whole-building decarbonisation

Have you ever finished designing a new building and wondered what technologies are specified for the building? When using delegated design for building technologies, is the scope clearly defined or is it left to the vendor to decide? If you do not know the answers to these questions — or worse, you say to yourself, ‘my vendor has that’ — this paper is for you. Regardless of project delivery, if building owners want to democratise their building data, take advantage of digital twin technologies and advanced data layer capabilities and operate their buildings at the highest possible levels of performance, they must take control of their building’s operational technologies (OTs). Delegated design of OTs is typically the root cause of building owners not controlling or owning their building performance data. This paper is intended to provide building owners with the basic framework for OT programming, which is the only way to ensure ownership and control over building performance data. Our previous Corporate Real Estate Journal paper from Vol. 12, No. 3, Spring 2023 titled ‘Integration of building science and data science to de-risk an affordable strategy for building decarbonisation’ provides a higher-level view of the benefits from the integration of OTs. The convergence of global challenges requires building owners to address building performance as performance is now expected by owners, investors, occupants and governments. Merging building science and data science is the most cost-effective way to deliver expected building performance over the life of a building. Smart building infrastructure technology democratises building data and is the key to cost-effectively controlling building performance. Data is the new gold and smart operational technology programming is the new shovel.