Page 478 - Shaping smarter and more sustainable cities - Striving for sustainable development goals

today but detailed analysis is require to ensure that there is no single point of failure so as to ensure
2
continuity of service as a result of any anticipated problem. Recent publicity of the Heartbleed
vulnerability as well as the legions of patches, issued for all of their operating systems by Microsoft
and other suppliers have provided ample evidence of the challenges of providing totally reliable
solutions.

Therefore there are two schools of thought with regard to the provision of a reliable and secure
solution for controlling an intelligent building. These two approaches are:
 Provision of a single system with all of the capabilities as is to some extent advocated by a
number of the traditional HVAC systems often referred to as building automation systems (BAS)
which have gradually expanded their capabilities to include a number of non‐traditional BAS
functions such as security, lighting control;
 The other alternative is to use an integration solution capable of talking a common language
with a specialized individual system providing access control, fire system, lighting system, etc.

This latter approach has the advantage that each of the systems can ultimately be operated as an
individual, non‐integrated solution and provide assurance to the owner/operator that if there is a
problem, the isolation will rapidly establish which component is causing the problem and which
component can therefore be temporarily "shed" from the integrated solution.

Unifying software (such as in the former solution) has in some cases been developed by one or two
specialised companies, which provide such integration to a very wide range of individual systems
provided by other manufacturers. The result of this solution is a single screen on which all individual
systems can be viewed.

Another subset of this solution is to use a number of independent systems all of which operate using
a single communication protocol and which therefore can all sit on the same network and be
addressed from any authorized computer on that network. The absence of a single screen
integrating all of the status information is generally not a major disadvantage although the size of
the network, the number of points being monitored, and the nature of the messages from each
individual system can clearly lead to significant impacts.
The above comments demonstrate that the design decisions for an intelligent building are not
predicated on a preconceived solution as they must depend on the particular implementation. It
should also be noted that the design of a new building is a very different undertaking than the
retrofit of an existing building. All these factors need to be analysed in order to assess and evaluate
the optimal technology and solution for any situation. Selection of the designers who are going to
perform this analysis are equally important and the owners, developers, and operators need all to
be involved to ensure a successful project.

3 Types of buildings

3.1 Single family

It is unlikely that a single family dwelling would really benefit significantly from significant
application of the intelligent building technologies concepts. There is little room for interaction
between systems, in particular, as a single family dwelling does not generally have many of the

____________________
2 Please see: https://www.openssl.org/.

468 ITU‐T's Technical Reports and Specifications