By monitoring and analysing all items of energy consumption, production and storage, smart buildings can manage flows as quickly and efficiently as possible. The goal is comfort and energy performance, which users both benefit from and take an active part in.
Smart buildings at the service of users
The smart building is designed from the outset to take into account the local specificities of its site, in particular the climate, to ensure that the best decisions are made on everything from the building’s orientation and the insulation of the interior.
Thanks to big data and artificial intelligence, the smart building adapts work environments in real time. With a technical management system, the settings of the heating, air conditioning ventilation and lighting are adjusted on the basis of real-time data. One such management system is Galaxy Pilot, the tool developed by the GA Group, and its artificial intelligence module, which was designed in partnership with the start-up Vesta-System and the Institut Polytechnique of Grenoble. The tool is a means of improving a building’s energy performance while at the same time enhancing users’ everyday comfort and well-being.
What’s more, smart buildings can play a decisive role in improving employee performance. With its modern, convivial, open work spaces, which facilitate communication and are conducive to work, the smart building adds a dimension of service to basic office building facilities. In the Agua building, the GA Group’s headquarters, the modular nature of the spaces provides employees with places where they can get some privacy, work as part of a team or simply relax, depending on their needs. Such a building provides the amenities and conveniences of everyday life that transform a traditional company into a great place to work.
Convinced that tertiary property must be at the service of companies' performance, we have put employees' well-being and comfort at the centre of our thinking. It is no longer enough for an office to be a work place – it must truly be a space where it is good to live on a day-to-day basis, where the quality of the environment allows employees to give their very best.
But users are not only beneficiaries of the smart building – they are also vital players.
The smart building, a new era for the “consum’actor”
By virtue of the weight they carry in energy consumption, users impact the energy performance of a smart building and discover that they have a real role to play. Users can contribute to a building’s energy performance through eco-friendly acts on an individual scale, such as giving preference to natural daylight or remembering to switch off electric lights and computers when they leave a room. They should integrate such reflexes into their everyday habits.
To rise to this challenge, companies must encourage employees to adopt new behaviours as part of their performance strategy. To avoid unnecessary lighting and heating expenses, for example, remember to enter the times and dates of your future absences and holidays in your diaries. The smart building’s features as well as the configuration of work spaces must also introduce employees to this eco-friendly dynamic so that they become socially responsible consumers, or “consumactors”.
Users must also assimilate a new state of affairs, on a larger scale – the fact that their smart buildings are integrated into a Smart Grid. This can result in new behaviours with an aim to enhancing energy efficiency, such as defining priorities in their individual energy consumption until the peak of consumption in the neighbourhood can be smoothed out.
By WordAppeal
