Take a Look Around! You’re in a Smart Building

The concept of Smart Environment and the Internet of Things has started to be used widely today. Even if almost, everyone is not aware of it, many things and places around us have ‘’smart’’ features. For this reason, we would like to inform you about smart buildings as well as the BAAS Project that we have developed to enhance the smart features of smart buildings.

What is a smart building and are there smart buildings around us?

Totally! Maybe you also live in a smart building, but you just don’t know it. Intelligent spaces are quite common today. These spaces can be not only residential but also shopping centers, schools, stadiums, and workplaces. Intelligent spaces are spaces equipped with enhanced features. Equipped with various systems and technologies, these spaces aim to make life easier. For example, by showing that the parking lot is full, they can direct you to another location, adjust the room temperature, and besides, they can benefit both your pocket and the environment by saving energy. Interoperability of systems such as ventilation systems and heating systems in a building is an important factor as well.

What did Intelligent Building Automation mean and what does it mean after BaaS?

As mentioned above, there are many different systems in Smart Spaces. It is important that these systems are interoperable by serving the purpose. Smart building automation means that many different systems come together and create synergy for defined purposes (decreased energy consumption, increased comfort, increased security …etc).

The main idea of our BAAS Project is focused on solving 2 basic problems encountered in smart buildings: Integration of different automation, and breaking existing dependencies to hardware vendors. These problems were that there were many different systems in the buildings and these systems could not communicate with each other and at the same time, the existing building automation was dependent on the first company that installed this system when it was wanted to extend. While working within the scope of our BAAS Project, Norbert Vicari, who is one of the key experts of Siemens and contributor of Fairhair Alliance, stated that there should be a 6-phase life cycle and later we called this life cycle the Smart Environment Creation Life Cycle. This life cycle consists of design, development, engineering, commissioning, operation, and optimization. And through BaaS we proved that this lifecycle approach practically works by developing tools for each vertex of the life cycle. (We still feel the pain of MPS :P )

The BAAS project became operational in 2016 and became a distinguished project across many different project applications. While the number of people working as part of the project has gradually decreased, we have always aimed to achieve success by working harder. Our BAAS Project has been a journey where we received many positive feedbacks despite the setbacks we faced. We collaborated with very important companies and people such as SIEMENS, Materna, University of Rostock, Everis, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Defne, Technical University of Istanbul, and the Technical University of Munich, gained much of a broader experience on how to manage R&D projects and worked with very valuable names and most importantly, we laid the foundations of our IoTWare Project.

If you would like to know more about IoTWare, you can check out the article right here!

We would like to thank the valuable people who were acting frontline throughout the BAAS project such as Christoph Niedermeier, Franz-Joseph Stewing, Francesco Borja, Christophe Joubert, Norbert Vicari, Egon Wüchner, Jelena Mitic, Frank Golatowski, Björn Butzin, Marc Oliver Pahl, Erdem Ergen, Cenk Dumlu, Erhan Ermişoğlu, Berna Örs, Güneş Karabulut, and Karel Slavicek who made the BAAS Project a successful project thanks to their hard work and devotion, and we hope to work together again in many different projects.

As a last remark, I would like to mention that we were lucky to meet our always smiling colleague Dr. Steffan Unger. He scattered joy while we were working hard, and he hid his illness in order to keep our morale up. I wish him rest in peace.

About Özer Aydemir

Computer engineer since 2002 and entrepreneur since 2007. CEO and Co-Founder of IOTIQ GmbH. Project leader for Eureka projects Insist, and I-DELTA; project member of BaaS, Demwatch, Insist, Mos2s, SecureGrid, Optimum, Pianism, I2Panema, Machinaide, and hopefully many others in the future.