Conscious Intelligent Buildings: Envisioning the Next Generation of Smart Buildings

Abstract

As one of the major industries that consume vast energy annually, the built environment industry is continuously exploring new building designs that would satisfy both occupants and the sustainability requirements. Considered as a new trend of building design for achieving economic, environmental, and occupant satisfaction goals, smart buildings are gaining momentum in research and development. Occupant-based design is considered an innovative idea for smart building automation systems as it aspires to focus on satisfying occupant’s needs while saving energy and reducing waste. This positioning paper argues that next in the evolution of buildings is conscious intelligent buildings, characterized by their cognitive capabilities, creativity, and empathy akin to human self-awareness. Based on the literature review which served as the methodology, the evolving advancements in meta-data, Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are potentially making this next paradigm possible. As for results, this article proposes a framework for defining conscious intelligent building. Its unique characteristics and underlying vision provide a new paradigm for leveraging big data analytics in the built environment. Enabled with cognitive and empathic interaction with the occupants, this achievement of higher intelligence can alter human-building relationship toward trust and thus increasing occupants’ satisfaction and emotional health in the built environment.

Charting climate adaptation integration in smart building rating systems: a comparative study

“…This transition is driven by a combination of various policies, regional and national energy and environmental goals, financial constraints, societal shifts, and technological changes. Moreover, the advancements of the 4.0 revolution, and fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic are shifting the building user expectations towards a more empathic and interactive buildings and put forward the immense potential of utilizing big data to enhance building performance as means to combat climate change (Khoja and Danylenko, 2020;Pishdad-Bozorgi and Zeng, 2022).…”