The Significance of User Involvement in Smart Buildings Within Smart Cities

Abstract

Instead of a systematic review on the progress of the smart built environment, some of the key milestones of professional or scientific development and use cases of intelligent buildings in the context of smart city concept will be addressed-describing also the intended interaction with the primer users: (1) citizens, (2) residents either as home owners or tenants and (3) occupants in commercial and public buildings. Smart and user-oriented environment, as defined in the 1980s to be fully integrated or in the millennium of 2000 considering user as an innovator, cannot be concluded to be the mainstream today in housing or in workplaces in commercial or public buildings or in industrial facilities. Nevertheless, the development of smart technology during last 4-6 decades has resulted to a strong “smart back end”-borrowing the term in software development. This technological readiness bears a good potentiality sufficient to the substantial improvement of living and working conditions even beyond the currently targeted energy efficiency. New applications for digitalized societies are expected to chance all paths of life. Service fusion based on individual rights on one’s own data is a key parameter for deep connectivity in information flows and consequently in operations. Platformization together with equitable and secured heavy open data exchange is employed in production, decision-making, smoothening of daily living, etc. to make current silos disappear. As well the IT giants as the large fauna of newly established startups urge to make new business in digitalization affecting positively on the economic situation since 2008 demanding structural reforms.