Top 5 Trends Transforming the Building Industry in 2019 that Will Shape the Future in 2020

Building Automation industry professionals know it's essential to fulfill their building occupants' expectations for a working, commercial or public environment and to be compliant with the latest global green building requirements. Thanks to the evolution of technologies, especially the emerging the Internet of Things (IoT) network, the Building Automation industry is being transformed by the following top 5 trends. Based on the long-term observations of Delta's Building Automation Business Group and subsidiaries, across the fields of building automation, lighting and surveillance, these trends will continue to push breakthrough applications for creating human-centric, comfortable and sustainable building environments.

1. IoT-integrated Building Automation (BA) management
With the increasing number of IoT devices and diversified IoT services, the conventional BA system is emerging as an IoT-integrated platform capable of converging Big Data, such as operation performance analytics, gathered from building equipment for more advanced BA applications.

We foresee that these trends will continue in 2020. According to a Gartner forecast in August 2019, the enterprise and automotive IoT market will grow to 5.8 billion endpoints in 2020, a 21% increase from 2019. Among all segments, building automation will be the segment with the largest growth rate in 2020 (42%).* The growth of IoT applications will drive standard IoT protocols and data sharing to larger data lakes.

2. Cybersecurity
The migration to all-IP communication backbones and the usage of IoT in building functions opens new possibilities for integration and functionality. However, with increasing cloud-based applications, building owners, managers, and IT professionals need to create BA infrastructures that provide very high levels of security. The growing awareness of cybersecurity over BA systems and IP surveillance networks will be the key driver for the evolution of all related products.

The main challenge is how to respond faster to threats and minimize cyber risks in IP-based BA and surveillance networks. The effective way to ensure security is to implement VPN tunneling in controllers, transport-level security such as TLS or use the separate network coupled through a designated gateway. Also, BA solutions providers have started to collaborate with cybersecurity services providers, from product design and firmware development, to reinforce the hardiness of cybersecurity and reduce security vulnerabilities.

3. Machine learning into edge devices
The transition of deep learning to the edge has begun. To fully understand occupants' needs and behaviors with proper analysis and metrics is critically important for any solution's effectiveness in an operation. Achieving more integrated automation with flexible and easy-to-use sensing data has become a major topic in the BA industry.

For deep learning, security systems are trained with examples of what a person is and is not. The development of edge-to-core processing will become significantly more common in coming years. As such more powerful edge devices will help distribute the required workload.

4. Intelligent lighting for more value-added applications
Intelligent lighting nowadays is not merely turning lights on or off automatically to save energy, but it is also creating more comfort lighting environments by scene setting or supporting occupants' circadian rhythms.

Combined with the wireless communication support, lighting has become part of the communication infrastructure within a building. The data regarding occupants' behaviors, locations, or interaction can be transmitted to the cloud for analysis and follow the implementation of a control strategy.

5. Human-centric solution is everything
Occupant-centric automation definitely is the trend for coming years. It is becoming essential that workplace, commercial buildings, and public facilities are designed with health and wellness centered environments. There will be more occupant interface applications, which allow occupants to interact with their system, to share data content with potential 3rd party analytics and systems through open standard methods.

More building automation products and solutions will be also designed for sharing more personal preferences and potentially connecting with other personal systems through wireless communications.

The five trends mentioned above will create larger opportunities in 2020. More ground-breaking applications are expected to support the concept of future-proof smart buildings.

* Source: Gartner (August 2019)