Developing Smart Services to Smart Campus

1. Introduction

The private sector attempts to conceptualise a smart campus and offer smart business solutions to university campuses by referring to the application of ubiquitous technologies, which is only one component of “smart” (Vasileva et al., 2018). Technocratic approach is typical; however, the implementation of smart technology is not the only perspective. Based on the definition of Xiong (2017) smart campus is about use the Internet of Things (IoT), data fusion, cloud computing, data mining and other information technologies to integrate the independent business systems and resources of university into an organic whole with highly collaborated capability, perception, as well as service ability to support development (Xiong, 2017).

This paper aims to shed light on how smart facilities services can be developed in the context of smart campus. It presents the research findings both from the literature and one case study from a Finnish campus.

2. Challenges in developing smart facilities services

Technology is changing the most fundamental truth about commercial real estate (CRE) – that value is based solely on location. While it still matters, of course, that a space be close to customers, employees and/or suppliers, information-based applications have the potential to add new ways for the CRE sector to create value for customers, differentiate from competitors and even find new sources of revenue. Specifically, the Internet of Things (IoT) is already having a significant impact on the corporate real estate (CRE) industry, helping companies move beyond a focus on cost reduction. IoT-applications aim to grow margins and enable features such as dramatically more efficient building operations, enhanced tenant relationships and new revenue generation opportunities (Kejriwal and Mahajan, 2016). One of the problems with the current practices in the various domains of facility management is that each facility is managed by its stakeholder in isolation from the management of other similar facilities. However, with the advent of new technologies such as cloud computing, there is an opportunity to unify the management of multiple geographically dispersed facilities (Lau et al., 2013).

What is coming to development of facilities services industry there are a number of drivers and barriers that influence the adoption of ICT solutions in facilities service sector (Scupola, 2012). These have been grouped under three major categories: organisational factors including strategic and operational factors; external environmental factors including supplier interdependence and industry characteristics; and technological factors including compatibility and complexity.

3. Case Study

The case study was conducted in the campus of Tampere University of Technology in Finland. The aim of the case study was to respond to demand for digital user services for use and maintain and facility. The case study building is new, non-faculty building, opened in autumn 2015. It is a multitenant innovation platform for university–industry collaboration. It is a combination of three public access floors including restaurants and a library, as well as five private access floors for companies. It has been equipped with many of the latest technologies and sensors, e.g. temperature, CO₂, light, electricity and motion sensors. Being based at the heart of university campus, it serves students and other users daily.

The development of smart facilities services was done in three phases:

• Phase 1: developing an agile way to visualise the data of the building;

• Phase 2: opening the data for one platform; and

• Phase 3: testing the platform for developing new services

The data were gathered from all phases by using meeting documents, interviews (service providers n=10, property owner n=2 and test-users n=10) and documents from participatory workshops (n=6). The intention in data gathering was to focus on processes to identify the hindrances and enablers of developing smart facilities services. The focus was not on analysing the technical solutions. The data was analysed by content analysis by using the applied framework from Scupola’s (2012) research about drivers and barriers in the adoption of ICT solutions in facilities service sector. The data were clustered independently by researchers according to three themes: the user, the service provision and technological factors enabling or hindering the smart facility service development.

4. Results

Phase 1 aimed to integrate the fragmented data of building and use the virtual reality model for visualisation of the case study building. The intention was to create a visualisation, which was easy to use for all stakeholders involved to development of smart facilities services including, e.g. space design. The virtual reality visualisation was prepared by transforming building information models (BIM) for use in game engines. Optimising the complex BIM models to be exported to game engines was an intensive and complicated process. The idea of virtual reality was fairly intimidating to persons who have not experienced it before, or have had negative experiences on either inadequate hardware or poorly designed experiences that have left them feeling motion sick. Once having overcome the initial learning curve of being in a new environment and learning the controls, it was observed that users representing diverse user groups were able to very quickly and effectively navigate around virtual environments.

Phase 2 aimed to improve the quality of the data used in the model. The fragmented data had different qualities. That caused challenges for integration of data. Additionally, the location of sensors was based on individual and fragmented source of information. The improvement of quality of the data and integrate, e.g. the lightning, energy and space use data were the challenge. Development of the open IoT-cloud was a learning curve in terms of finding out the ways to work in the ecosystem, in the symbiosis with each other.

Phase 3 aimed to develop a IoT-cloud of property owner to be used by service providers. The location based smart facilities service was developed. While entering to case study building and e.g. to one of the floors, one could take a smart phone, open the application and locate oneself to the place. In that very moment, one can see the data about the indoor environment conditions by using 360 browser or augmented reality application. Integration of data sources did not demand programming. Data was accessible in API-interfaces. That made the development of application as a service quick, easy and clear. The data used in the service is in real time and it is collected both from integrated data sources and external data sources.

The analysis of phases in terms of factors enabling or hindering the smart facilities service development is summarised in Table 1.

Based on the analysis the smart facilities service processes can be summarised to three processes:

1. experience processes for users, which demand training, easy access and motivation;

2. data-based service processes, which demand data transformation, integration and security; and

3. technology processes, which demand diverse investments and ownerships to tools and equipment.

5. Conclusions

One campus building as a test bed for developing smart facilities services indicated that technocratic approach demands also user experience and data approach. Additionally, technology solutions can be based of growing trend of bringing own devices to different environments. To develop smart facilities services, it is essential to break the boarders between different realities, different service providers and different data sources. One can claim if the study increased the knowledge especially in terms of developing smart campus. The case study approach with demonstrations was easy to conduct in the campus environment with student resources. The further data gathering about the user experiences and functionality of the services can have more impact to campus development as such. This paper touched upon the literature about what kind of smart facilities services there are and investigated how they can be developed; future studies are needed to understand better why they are needed.