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PhotonStar Technology: Environmental sensors and cloud based analytics deliver IoT-based Building Management as a Service
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Buildings
Applicable Functions
- Facility Management
Use Cases
- Building Automation & Control
- Building Energy Management
- Predictive Maintenance
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
The Challenge
Heating, ventilation, air conditioning and lighting represent the largest energy costs for businesses; worldwide buildings consume 42 percent of all electricity. Understanding the detailed usage patterns of these services within buildings and having the ability to manage these services more efficiently will deliver cost savings to the bottom line very quickly. Eighty percent of buildings are already constructed; affordable building management systems need to be built around flexible and configurable hardware that can be retrofitted. The cost of such integrated solutions has historically been high and not integrated into small or medium sized building developments, as it was difficult to justify the additional expense. This left many commercial buildings with no efficient way to manage their operational costs related to heating, cooling and lighting.
About The Customer
PhotonStar is a British technology company that focuses on intelligent building solutions. They have developed a new product, halcyon cloudBMS, which uses the IBM® Watson™ IoT Platform to deliver an affordable, integrated building management system. This system can be retrofitted to almost any building to deliver reductions in operational costs and new insights into how buildings are utilized by their occupants. The service is based on the low cost wireless monitoring and control platform, halcyonPRO2 which includes lighting, heating, cooling, shading and power management and a network of environmental sensors.
The Solution
PhotonStar is using the IBM® Watson™ IoT Platform in their new product, halcyon cloudBMS, to deliver an affordable, integrated building management system which can be retrofitted to almost any building to deliver reductions in operational costs and new insights into how buildings are utilized by their occupants. The service is based on the low cost wireless monitoring and control platform, halcyonPRO2 which includes lighting, heating, cooling, shading and power management and a network of environmental sensors. All of the halcyon lighting and sensing fixtures are subject to a patented secure commissioning process during installation with operational information collected from the lighting network robustly encrypted, transmitted and stored using capabilities from the IBM Watson IoT Platform. This allows key metrics such as energy use and occupancy data to be sent back to centralized halyconPRO2 servers in each building and consolidated in the cloud. The halcyon solution delivers an optimized working environment and contributes to savings in overall building energy use.
Operational Impact
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