Smart Building Application Optimization for L&T Realty

About Company

This renowned organization has proved to be a Pioneer in the Real Estate but also has developed a proficient skill in enduring Real Estate with the latest Technology that is in Tech Market. Its products and systems are marketed in over 30 countries worldwide. Backed by the parent company’s rich experience of over 75 years in the construction industry, they have made an extremely successful foray into the real-estate industry following the philosophies, ethics and work approach that have been behind its sustained growth. The company believes that progress must be achieved in harmony with the environment and is deeply committed to environmental protection and community welfare. Each project is a mission to fulfill customer expectations and a promise to set new standards of delivery and satisfaction. 

Project Summary

The client has their Smart Building Application developed with the help of Internet of Things (IoT) Technology for various smart solutions. The application manages and helps operate the sensors that are attached to their building from the parking lot to the top floor of the building. This smart application is in connectivity with Azure IoT Hub that manages the data in transit and data at rest and stores every data captured in Azure Storage Account. 

The smart application integrates all sub-systems of Buildings which are required for building operations such as Energy System, HVAC System, Lighting Systems, Safety & Security Systems, UPS, etc. along with other devices and sensors required for providing Building Insight along with User experiences. 

 This building will have multiple smart system such as Smart Parking, Smart Cafeteria, Indoor Navigation, Smart Meeting, Smart Office, Digital Signage, Air Quality Management, Visitor Management System, Smart Toilets, GPS based Fleet Management & Energy Management system. This system will enhance UX Experience, Improve in Productivity and Opex cost (Energy Consumption by HVAC, Lighting, UPS, etc.) optimization. 

Following azure services are implemented to serve the purpose: 

• Azure IoT Hub that connects to the smart application in on-premises.
• Azure Storage Account to store the data.
• Azure Recovery Service Vault to backup SQL Managed Instances and Application Servers.
• Azure Virtual Machines that have the application hosted on them.

The overall solution is Azure based and hence all the services are implemented keeping in mind the capabilities of Microsoft Azure and the customer support that Microsoft provides. Also, with the help of geo-replication to another region, the failure of any services can easily be recovered, and Disaster Management criteria is also met. 

Challenge

The organization, possessing their workloads in Azure IoT cloud, encountered different challenges while in the development phase of the project. Following are the most critical challenges that were faced: 

• There was no real-time visibility of data for the client & the end-customer to track & monitor measurement & control data.
• Security was another main concern for the data transitions from one smart device to another.
• Electricity load management was a major point of concern since the building was equipped heavily with high quality sensors and devices that keep utilizing the electric energy.

Solution

IFI’s certified consultants analyzed the smart building application and its integration with Azure and after calculating all the possibilities came to the following solutions: 

• The IoT platform supports a robust data management system architecture to handle enormous volume of data coming-in from connected end-devices.
• Using an IoT Hub provided better security in comparison to an on-premises version and enabled reliable secure bidirectional communication among different smart devices.

The data that is collected on the daily basis through IoT Hub was analyzed for different devices and energy consumption was calculated.