Unified buildings

What’s next for the smart building evolution? In Chapter 1, An Introduction to IoT and Smart Buildings, we defined a smart building as a building that uses an integrated set of technology, systems, and infrastructure to optimize building performance and occupant experience. We have spent numerous chapters reviewing how IoT sensors and devices, connected with computing processing capabilities and smart applications, monitor, measure, manage, and control nearly every system in a building to improve efficiency, reduce the impact on the environment, lower operation costs, increase revenue, and, most importantly, enhance the occupant’s quality of experience.

Buildings have evolved from local single control systems in the early 1980s to centralized controls in the late 1990s. In the 2000s, intelligent buildings added some communication, databases, and analytics capabilities to allow distributed systems to communicate back to a central system with a heavy...