Clockworks: Putting Building Control in the Operators' Hands
Stephen Samouhos, KGS Buildings
How many pieces of equipment are malfunctioning in your building? How do you know that your design changes were a good idea? How much are your energy efficiency investments really paying back? How do you know that your building is running the way that you want it to operate every day?
Historically, these have been tough, contentious questions to answer, often requiring detailed investigation and consulting, and sometimes even litigation. But the world of building technology is now shifting to where we can answer these difficult questions, and others, in near real time with complete transparency using actual data from our buildings. As the cost for collecting, interpreting, storing, and presenting building data continues to decrease, we could experience a fundamental change in how buildings are designed, built, and maintained.
KGS Buildings is proud to demonstrate Clockworks to illustrate this vision of the future, where a software platform can leverage the existing capabilities of building control systems to multiply operations resources, validate performance investments, and inform future design.
This demonstration will explore a number of issues related to this vision, including practical aspects of collecting data from laboratory buildings, the benefits and pitfalls of automated data analysis versus manual analysis, the role of dashboards to summarize information, and case study results from actual deployments.
Biography:
Stephen Samouhos is a partner and co-founder at KGS Buildings. Mr. Samouhos earned his Bachelor of Science ('04), Masters of Science ('06), and Ph.D. ('10), all in mechanical engineering, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with a full scholarship to pursue his doctoral dissertation, entitled "Building Condition Monitoring." He also grew up in an electro-mechanical contracting family in New Jersey where he gained many years of exposure to practical field work and engineering that is pertinent to building energy efficiency. Today Mr. Samouhos strives to combine the practice of fixing buildings with cutting-edge information technology (IT) and real-world engineering in order to deliver scalable and effective solutions for better building performance. In addition to business development and software engineering at KGS Buildings, Mr. Samouhos is also an avid speaker and technology advocate on issues pertaining to IT convergence with the built environment, with invited talks on the subject at the New York Academy of Sciences, U.S. Department of Energy, and the Urban Studies department at MIT.