CTCI's Three Intelligent Solutions: A New Model of Innovative Intelligent Buildings

— Pom-huei Chen, Senior Engineer of Electric & I&C Dept., Group Intelligent Solutions Business

CTCI GISB has long been focusing on developing Intelligent Buildings keeping in mind its vast experience in mechanical and electrical engineering businesses.  It planned to bring together the group's resources to innovation and application of Intelligent Building techniques, including the Building Management System (BMS) with the following three intelligence solutions: Intelligent Solution Platform (iSP) developed by the Group's Research & Innovation Center, Mr. Energy 50001, the energy management system developed by CCI ASI, and the intelligent maintenance system BIM 7D developed by CTCI SEC to intellectualize buildings.

Combining Three Intelligence Solutions,
CTCI's Comprehensive Integrated Service for Intelligent Buildings

Although the definition of Intelligent Building varies from country to country, it still can be generally described as something giving a brilliant mind to a building to interact with users, to meet their demands, and to provide a comfortable living space with brand-new life experiences.

Countries all over the world have advanced their efforts to Intelligent Building for more than 30 years, but it was not possible until the last decade, until IOT, big data and intelligent analysis succeeded.

CTCI has been dedicated to the area of intelligent building, intelligent plant, intelligent transportation and smart city to complete the development of intelligent technology in CTCI Group. In this article, we will show you how the CTCI's GISB puts together the Group's resources and intelligent mechanical/electrical engineering experience into innovation and application of Intelligent Building. This includes Intelligent Solution Platform (iSP) developed by the Group Research & Innovation Center, the energy management system Mr. Energy 50001 developed by CCI ASI and BIM 7D, the intelligent maintenance system developed by CTCI SEC, and how CTCI's GISB converts the building space with the intelligence of active sense by combining the three solutions with the Building Management System, BMS, to build a human-friendly environment that is safe, healthy, comfortable, convenient, conserves energy and is sustainable. 

To build the intelligent functions, firstly, CTCI's GISB uses the energy management system, Mr. Energy 50001, to analyze the energy consumption pattern and calculate the optimal operating conditions. Then, this data will be passed on to the BMS for tuning of systems, such as HVAC, lightning, electricity, and plumbing for energy conservation. Secondly, the intelligent maintenance system of BIM 7D will be used to integrate the building's inner space information with equipment specifications and drawings. It allows the equipment to send timely alerts to the maintenance staff when an error occurs, and also provides detailed historical information to managers. It thus helps achieve real-time repair, maintenance and statistical analysis. In addition, by integrating the data from BMS with AI analysis through iSP,  an intelligent building is created with active thinking and adaptive capability. The integrated service provided by the three intelligence solutions for Intelligent Building is described below:

1.Mr. Energy 50001 System
It is a custom platform made for building energy management. It allows the management to form an energy baseline as per the area of the building and the use of specific areas or equipment, and compare and analyze with Energy Performance Indexes, EnPIs. This system is based on the four steps of energy management: monitor, analyze, plan, and check to conserve energy, and thus save on overall costs.

2.BIM 7D
Targeting intelligent maintenance, BIM 7D makes the service and management of maintenance faster, more convenient, and its applications and integration more efficient. In addition to simplifying the process and reducing the maintenance time, it can also actively provide information on the equipment, enabling the management to easily search its historical record and find the best

3.Intelligent Solution Platform, iSP
iSP is an intelligent platform designated by CTCI to be used for IoT in the future. It can be applied widely to intelligent buildings, intelligent plants, intelligent industrial parks, smart city, etc. Take the case of an intelligent building, for example. iSP can collect the data, analyze it, develop and apply it to the system and using the information of the building gathered and the external Big Data database  provide the most efficient operating mode  and thus  have its own intelligent thinking.

Combining the State-Of-The-Art Intelligent Technology,
CTCI to Build a Demonstration Building of Energy-Efficient Intelligence

Professional engineering experience gained over the past and the future-oriented innovations are CTCI’s best tools to build a smart city. Take for example the “CTCI Second Office Tower” now under planning. It will be a demonstration of an intelligent building in accordance with the Group’s thinking in intelligent direction. Besides, it is not only an integration of the three intelligence solutions mentioned earlier, but also of some innovation in intelligent MEP engineering.


1.Intelligent Energy Conservation
In addition to the most frequently used energy-conserved construction method, the engineering team has also set up an intelligent link, which allows the building to identify the number of people in the office and adjust the energy consumption and the linkage of air condition, lighting and curtains to cut the influence factor and reduce the use of energy. 

2.Intelligent Security and Surveillance
Security is always  our first priority, thus besides the existing security and surveillance mechanism, this building will use intelligent image-recognition system to link with building security management system and thus  will be able to  recognize faces, trace people, analyze their traits, predict fire or recognize suspicious left-over packages. The security level of this building is thus improved, as also the accuracy of facial recognition day by day. Although facial recognition is used to assist the door security system at the beginning, it will replace access control card in the future.

3.Intelligent Fire Protection
When fire occurs, the building will guide and evacuate people with real-time calculation reducing the possibility of making wrong choices in path selection to the exit. It also escalates the emergency response performance.

4.Intelligent Water System
In addition to equipment with golden water preservation certification, we also design a complete water recycle plan for this building, varying from commonly used rainwater harvesting system to the condensate water of PAH or FCU collecting system, which will recycle and reuse water.

Under the thriving development of Intelligent Building and IoT, the present building management system is developing the supporting WAN, web communication protocols and control interface from the original support of LAN, industrial communication protocols and control interface. It had gradually become a cross-platform with mobilization and cloudization. In the future, it is expected that the development with high-level programming language and creative application would be popular in the area of automation control.

CTCI's Second Office Tower will use Message Queuing Telemetry Transport, MQTT, a real-time push notification protocol designed for IoT, as the information exchanging format between CTCI’s three intelligence solutions. Under the current scheme, BMS is mainly responsible for collecting building internal information and controlling system linkage, then provides energy data required by Energy 50001 and operating status/history of equipment read by BIM 7D through MQTT. Then the data will be analyzed and compared in iSP to offer the optimal energy conservation data and personal comfort. Besides, it can plan maintenance automatically to extend the lifetime of the equipment, and also allows us to expand or upgrade the equipment without affecting the operation of the management system, thanks to the individual operating ability of each intelligence solution with greater potential for growth in the future.

Intelligent Mechanical & Electrical Engineering Experience Helps
CTCI to Preserve Space for Building Expansion and Upgrade

Following continuous breakthroughs in technology, the mechanical and electrical systems of a building often need upgradation or expansion. In general, it often takes years for a building to complete from the planning stage, during which period the original design of the mechanical and electrical system would need change due to new technologies and techniques. Therefore, an upgrade and expansion of the system is inevitable and necessary in the future, and it should be handled with abundant caution and knowledge of intelligent mechanical and electrical systems. Let us take the CTCI's Second Office Tower, for example, to introduce how we preserve the space for future expansion and upgrade of the systems by adding the following three schemes to form the Intelligent Building System.

1.To upgrade the communication bandwidth, Cat.6A will be adapted in all networks in the building
 As the communication bandwidth in the building will become higher and higher, and with the new data rate of 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T, the future requirement of the bandwidth should take into account the type of cable to be used. If we chose Cat.5e or Cat.6, we might face the risk of rising demand, so we chose Cat.6A. Besides, it not only follows the power supply trend of Ethernet, but also prevents from rising temperatures and energy consumption.

2.Fiber optic ring network reduces the chance of circuit breakage
Most mechanical and electrical equipment in this building are connected to the network, which is designed to form a ring loop to prevent   disconnection even if a single section of the network is damaged.

3.Redundant building management system
To ensure the safety and reliability of the building system, a redundant building system design is chosen. There are two servers in the central control room, which have the same copy of the management system and database, and each of them connects to the route through an Ethernet cable. Data in each server is synchronized and they will mutually supervise each other. If one fails, the other takes over. 

Conclusion

As the saying goes “Technology always comes from human nature,” and a city founded by human-oriented buildings is the surest way to show a nation’s progress. With our society continuously growing, and the strong implementation of intelligent space policy by the government, the integral technique of feeding information/communication equipment into a building will gradually become mature. In the next generation of Intelligent Building thinking, in addition to intelligent linkage and function of the building management system, the focus will be on communication and integration with cross-platform systems.

 The corporate culture of “Professionalism, Integrity, Teamwork and Innovation” has made CTCI a well-known brand and an international enterprise that keeps pace with other international engineering companies from Europe, Americas, Japan, and Korea. In the future, we will keep our focus on the trend and development of Intelligent Building, continuously upgrade engineering service, and march towards the vision of being the “Most Reliable Global Engineering Services Provider”.