Page 480 - Shaping smarter and more sustainable cities - Striving for sustainable development goals

guests may be at a premium. From the hotel perspective its ability to adapt to the current occupancy
rate is much aided by the use of IBT. The ability to "shut down a room" or to "open up a room" in
response to an arriving guest or a departing guest can provide a significant impact on the bottom
line. With accurate and complete information planning is easily achieved to only clean rooms which
have been used, to only heat and to only light rooms which are occupied. Individual staff members
can be readily monitored as part of the overall building effectiveness. Many hotels already provide
suitable "intelligent" links between the television and the hotel's billing system. It is now regular
practice for there to be a keyboard in each room and for one of the channels to provide a screen
and communication so that guests can check out, settle accounts and order special services as they
may wish. In summary, the hotel is fertile ground for increasing the benefits of automation through
an integration of its operational systems, thereby yielding an intelligent building.

3.5 Hospital

A hospital is very sophisticated in some of the "intelligent" applications which are already widely
used. Those functions are however largely related to the delivery of medical services. For example,
many hospitals have developed or acquired special software used to track patients who arrive in the
emergency room and require significant testing and processing within the emergency room, often
before they are then discharged without having entered the hospital's system.

Patients are booked in clinics, laboratory requisitions are filed, hospital cards are provided, and
psychiatric wards are managed. The intelligent building aspect however is left far behind because
there is very little scheduling that can be accomplished in a manner which will yield significant
benefits to the hospital's bottom line. HVAC is required 24 hours per day and lighting can only be
"reduced" during "sleeping hours". The requirements of maintaining a hospital as "a publicly
accessible facility" and to "provide effective security" is without question a contradiction. In many
hospitals entrances are now being locked except for the emergency room which are still open
24 hours daily even when some of the other locations conform to a consistent need at all times. The
requirements to ensure that standby generators are always ready to provide their services, that
patient records are always available to the physicians providing treatment are two very different
needs and there is little room to provide integration of these two requirements. The legal
requirements to ensure confidentiality of all patient information is a good reason to consider
segregating the networks used for building control and for providing medical services.

3.6 Factory

Factories are usually custom built in order to manufacture a car, a computer or another
manufactured product. As such the processes necessary for the manufacturing are quite secondary
to the control and management of the building. For this reason the intelligent building aspect
addresses only the maintenance of the building(s) to ensure that the environment provided by the
building is appropriate for the machines and processes carrying on the manufacturing of defined
products. In other respects maintaining, managing and informing on the operation of the building
itself is no different than the functionalities called for in a multi‐unit residential or commercial
environment.

3.7 Intelligent buildings and new business opportunities

The "intelligent building" concept goes far beyond supporting sustainability goals, saving energy,
enhancing efficiency and reducing costs. The concept also represents processes as well as services,
profits, job creation and capacities enhancement in the ICT and building industries. The concept

470 ITU‐T's Technical Reports and Specifications