Today’s state-of-the-art building and environmental control systems have failed to enable facilities and operations management. Our buildings are inefficient and the people using them are under-served.

Building infrastructure and management technology has not kept pace with the increasing complexity of the built environment. Building energy  and occupant needs are increasingly dynamic. Contributing extrinsic factors include seasonal building usage, daylight savings, or weather phenomena. As regional markets evolve, buildings can run longer hours, support wider end uses, and support greater levels of economic productivity, creating thinner margins for error.

Furthermore, split incentives create barriers to invest in solutions. For example, it is common in leased facilities for landlords to install the cheapest HVAC equipment available. They know it will be renters, not themselves, who pay utilities and maintenance. Inadequate equipment becomes the tenant’s problem. These conflicting incentives have significant downstream impacts on energy efficiency, carbon emissions and people.

Labor costs to support manual analysis and corrective action has been prohibitive. To meet occupant comfort and maintain cost and energy efficiency, a dynamic machine-assisted approach is needed.

The sheer number of possible operating configurations and nonlinear interdependencies make it difficult to understand and optimize energy efficiency with manual analysis and simple engineering formulas. A machine-assisted approach is needed to meet operator objectives while maintaining cost and energy efficiency.