Over the years, buildings have increasingly become automated, evolving into what are known as “smart buildings”. These buildings are designed to provide enhanced services to occupants, including better indoor comfort, climate, user experience, energy efficiency, and sustainability.
Smart buildings hold many promises. According to different definitions, they should be data-driven, enabling them to continuously learn, predict, and adapt based on conditions inside and outside the building. They should also optimize their operations, enhance the performance of highly automated building systems, interact with occupants and energy grids, automatically detect and diagnose faults, maintain a digital twin, and manage data efficiently using ontologies and semantic principles.
While this topic has gained significant attention, it raises many questions regarding the true nature of smart buildings, how to assess their performance and intelligence, and whether they are genuinely beneficial and sustainable.
In that context, the Nordic Smart Building Initiative (NSBI) aims to create and coordinate a collaborative forum to discuss matters related to smart buildings in the Nordic countries. Dedicated task forces and working sub-groups conduct collaborative investigations into specific questions related to smart buildings, aiming to provide actionable insights to both the research community and the building industry.
The NSBI will produce and disseminate new knowledge, reviews, and best practices. It will also conduct transversal comparisons across different countries and facilitate interesting discussions through webinars, workshops, technical reports, peer-reviewed scientific articles, and magazine articles.
The main focus of the NSBI is to gather researchers, academics, engineers, consultants, practitioners, and other stakeholders in the smart building industry in the Nordic countries, including Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The working groups and discussions are also open to participants from other countries; however, discussions and work will primarily focus on issues relevant to the Nordic context.
The current working sub-groups of the NSBI are working on the following topics:
- Mapping smart buildings in the Nordics
- What is a smart building in the Nordic context?
- Tools for smart building design and assessment
- AI and smart controllers for smart buildings
- Digital twins and smart buildings
- Barriers and drivers to the adoption of smart buildings
- Building management/automation systems in smart buildings
- Smart building life cycle and resilience to the future world
- Ontologies and semantic principles for smart buildings
- Teaching and training about smart buildings
The NSBI currently has 40 active participants from 27 institutions and companies across 13 countries. The NSBI is led by SINTEF Community (Project leader: Hicham Johra), with endorsements from IBPSA World and IBPSA-Nordic (the International Building Performance Simulation Association in the Nordic countries).
You can find an 8-minute video presentation of the Nordic Smart Building Initiative here.