iCity 1: Smart Public Building

Exploratory study of the usability of smart home technologies as an extension of traditional building automation (GA) in public buildings.

In the smart home market, key players have not yet been able to establish themselves either technologically or economically - an assertion of individual technologies and providers as in traditional building automation is uncertain. To avoid being tied to a specific provider, new concepts based on an open source platform (openHAB) were developed. The goals were sustainable building use, increased user comfort, and easy retrofitting of existing buildings. The research interest was mainly focused on the requirements of public buildings for the use of wireless smart home technologies.

• Analysis of public building requirements and classification of public buildings and suitable smart applications.
• Survey of public institutions in the Stuttgart region on the prevalence of smart applications and planned investments
• Design and prototypical implementation of different application scenarios in the university's buildings
• Integration of users at the university as well as interested communities

• Establishment of a client-server structure as a research environment; networking of selected buildings at the university and installation of approx. 120 sensors and actuators; concept and prototype for distributed smart systems
• Development of various application scenarios, including: Smart Metering; Smart Lecture Room / Office (window status, heating control, occupancy sensor, room climate, CO2 traffic light, user feedback, tablet with user interface, etc.); Room Occupancy (estimation of room occupancy)
• Integration of further sensors and services into the research environment, e.g. parking sensor on campus, occupancy of the neighboring parking garage, air quality in the outdoor area, local weather

Public institutions often use buildings as tenants or do not have the resources to retrofit their building stock with wired automation systems. Smart home devices combined with open solutions such as openHAB are interoperable and vendor-independent, and can be adapted to different needs. However, they face and have to answer new challenges, such as scalability, reliability, IT security and data protection.