When Iot Meets BIM

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and all the hype that it is generating, we’re starting to see many important use cases for IoT which are now commercial viable. We first witnessed smart devices which became mainstream in developed markets like USA and Western Europe, now we are seeing IoT driven smart devices like smart thermostats, talking fridges and lights that intelligently react and alter according to time of the day and season.

But have you ever wondered

What will happen when we add BIM to this mix and how will transform the day to day operations and management of a building ?
How it will impact the sector of Construction Management ?
How the concept of Green Buildings will leverage IoT & BIM ?
How it can influence you Prefabricated Component Manufacturing strategy?

The next section helps you answer these questions.

Building Control Systems

Organizations have developed a network of sensors and software solution to monitor data like the sophisticated Building Control Systems (BCS) seen across many buildings nowadays that collects data from thousands of end-points; intermittent data in the building like the movements and motions of occupants.

It also helps with adjusting heating levels correspondingly as people congregate in conjunction with the position of the sun changes, monitor the levels of carbon dioxide, the amount of lighting relative to natural light entering the building and levels of energy usage. What seemed like a simple question kicked off a whole bunch of work and a chain reaction of events. Many newly designed buildings have a BIM
modus. For older buildings, reality captures like augmented reality and laser scanning the building is an optimum tool for quantitative analysis.

As one can imagine, this creates a lot of data and information for building operations people to deal with. A phenomenal concept to develop novel ways to represent the data in the context of the building, like
a heat map superimposed on the model as well as the paths of people moving
through the building have been successfully achieved.

Now that I have all this data what do I do with it?

At this point, a team can begin to learn a lot from the data and apply it to other buildings and future projects for the ultimate sustainable design project. Designers could use the same tools and methodologies that building operations people use to simulate the building before it is even built. Since they have a well of relevant data they can try different sustainability techniques and technologies for optimal building performance of future buildings and structures.

Construction Management

Time is money, so any delays or hiccups on a construction project including overhauling expenses can become very costly. So how do you back up all trades on site whilst also making sure your critical heavy equipment does not go down? With IoT!

Heavy construction equipment is being outfitted with sensors, which can be remotely monitored for key indicators and patterns of potential maintenance issues like temperature fluctuations, excessive vibrations, etc. When abnormal patterns are detected, alerts will trigger maintenance workers to intervene early, before the critical equipment fails. Performing predictive maintenance and redeeming overhauling costs. This intelligent system can save critical time and money, as well as prevent unnecessary delays in construction projects.

Going Green

The construction industry is a huge inevitable and helpless agent of landfill waste – up to 40% of all solid waste in the US comes from the buildings projects. But the green building movement has become about much more than keeping building materials out of landfills. As a result, it is influencing the design and engineering of building systems by themselves, allowing buildings to reduce their impact on the environment through decisive energy management.

Today’s green buildings are proactively being engineered to do things like, shutting down unnecessary systems automatically when the building is unoccupied, or open and close louvers automatically to let in the required and optimal levels of natural light. These are just some of the cool ways that the construction industry is learning to be more sustainable with help from IoT.

With the help of IoT, a cloud-based energy monitoring system is expected to reduce annual energy consumption by up to 15 percent. A separate app analyzes the current power consumption of the building and values and makes the savings potential visible only to the owners. Industrial plants, commercial buildings, and machinery collates the information at data centers for analysis.

office complexes, shopping centers, and logistics centers are among the largest consumers of any energy system. Operators are faced with the rigorous challenges of using power as efficiently as possible to reduce consumption and in turn, reduce costs. The sensors and measuring devices are connected and supply data on how much energy each machine has used for each activity. This data serves as the core basis for operational energy management and can be very efficiently used in various energy consumption analyses.

Intelligent Prefabricated Components

Using RFID sensors, individual prefabricated parts can be accurately tracked down throughout the supply chain. Since the building occupies a comparatively small footprint but requires large prefabricated components, it is logistically a complex task to coordinate and assemble the installation. RFID data is used to help mitigate the effects of any downstream delays in construction. The data is then fed into the BIM once parts are installed, allowing for real-time rendering of the building in progress, as well as the establishment of project controls and KPIs.

Using prefabricated building components can be a faster and more cost effective method than traditional building methods, and it has an added benefit of creating less construction waste as well. However, using prefab for large commercial building projects can be very complex to coordinate. The IoT is helping to solve this problem