Skip to main content
Bosch Energy and Building Solutions Global
Digital real estate

Smart Buildings benefit people and the environment

Connected solutions and new digital services can transform commercial buildings into smart, efficient, sustainable, safe, and comfortable environments that flexibly adapt and respond to people’s needs. But what does it take to give a building smarts? And how does it benefit owners, operators, and users?

Smart Buildings

What is a Smart Building?

Smart Buildings help save energy by networking intelligent building technologies, increasing the comfort and convenience of users, and ensuring consistently reliable operation. While individual building technologies have so far been the focus, Smart Buildings are going a crucial step further: by taking advantage of digitalization and the Internet of Things (IoT) to holistically manage aspects like sustainability, safety and security, and comfort. Individual functions and systems share data with one another to add as much value as possible for a building’s users and operator and the environment. Smart Buildings intelligently leverage technologies and data to ensure optimal working and living spaces. In smart offices and shopping centers, at airports or in hospitals. The future belongs to intelligent buildings!

Networked technologies for Smart Buildings

The options for making a building smart vary widely depending on requirements. Networking of systems, software, and sensors and intelligent use of generated data create optimal conditions while ensuring smooth, efficient processes and transparent, cost-effective operation. The possibilities include, but aren’t limited to, the use of a digital building twin. Bosch offers solutions that integrate all areas of building technology. Everything from a single source, customized, and optimally planned and designed to yield the results that you as our customer want and need.

What are the advantages of Smart Buildings?

The digitalization of buildings is already in full swing across industries and sectors. The owners, operators, and users of stores, office complexes, clinics, industrial facilities and so on can all benefit by entering into a partnership with Bosch for designing and implementing smart building solutions.

Transparent

Easily monitor all of your building’s systems at a glance. Our services will help you predict how they will develop over time.

Efficient

Our services simplify processes to ensure more efficient maintenance and more economical operation of your building. A modular approach ensures flexibility for adapting to future developments.

Sustainable

Significantly reduce energy consumption in your building – thus conserving resources, meeting climate protection targets, and benefiting the environment.

Cost-effective

Ongoing operation of a building accounts for 80% of total costs over its lifetime, far more than its construction. The good news is that you can benefit from lower operating costs by optimizing how your building runs.

Safe

As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And improved monitoring lets you offer your building’s users a safe environment for living or working.

Comfortable

Create a forward-looking environment and attractive property: with a building that leverages advanced technology to almost invisibly meet its users’ needs.

Smart Buildings score points in every respect

Smart Buildings are authentic black belts in terms of sustainability and efficiency, impressing operators and users while also benefiting the environment.

Safe, sustainable Smart Buildings that support people with digital features have a clear edge in the marketplace. The extent to which a building adapts to its users’ needs influences where the generation of so-called digital natives prefers to spend time. Buildings that extensively integrate technology support New Work approaches, while IoT services facilitate everyday operations and activities on diverse levels.

Buildings continue to rank among the largest energy consumers. They account for nearly 40% of global carbon emissions, so addressing them is essential for achieving climate neutrality by the year 2050. Intelligent buildings monitor their own energy needs, and automatically control, analyze, and optimize themselves. They boost sustainability day in, day out throughout the year while constantly adjusting indoor temperatures, lighting, and ventilation in response to changing conditions and requirements. Users feel their best, and the environment benefits from a high level of energy efficiency.

The many useful capabilities that an intelligent building offers its users include the ability to quickly spot and deal with problems, detect when and where repairs or maintenance are needed and plan these activities accordingly, and ensure optimal use of rooms and space. An ongoing dialog between a building and those who use it finetunes its management processes, facilitates maintenance and repairs while reducing their frequency, and even permits remote maintenance. The building itself becomes the best possible partner for facility and energy managers, supports everyone involved, simplifies and digitalizes processes, and helps to efficiently monitor and therefore lower operating costs.

Smart Building use cases: the future belongs to networked building technology

State-of-the-art building technology makes many things possible and easier. When commercial buildings are guided step by step into the digital future, proprietors, operators, and users can all immediately begin benefiting from a wide range of features. The following examples illustrate how this can work in practice.

Systems and technologies in the COBIS technical center

Energy-efficient HVAC systems

The use of a digital building twin makes it possible to efficiently monitor HVAC systems and optimize their performance by intelligently using available data. This can yield major energy savings and reduce environmental burdens.

Man exits building through revolving door with mobile phone in hand

Digital access cards

Modern, reliable, and compliant with data privacy regulations: smartphones play a starring role in this mobile access and visitor management solution.

Two men walk through office in a carbon neutral company by Bosch Energy and Building Solutions

The path to becoming a carbon-neutral company

Energy management relies on digitalization for ongoing recording and analysis of what locations, buildings, and machines consume. This achieves transparency of all energy used as the basis for improving energy efficiency and reducing carbon emissions.

People in the comfortable entrance area of a Healthy Building

From ambiance to indoor climate

The right combination of architecture, building materials, and technical building systems supports the health and wellbeing of everyone present on site. What plays the key roles in this?

A man walking down stairs in an open office space

Buildings as personal assistants

In the megatrend of New Work, the focus is on people and their personal needs. This example illustrates how an intelligently automated building can perform completely new roles.

Employee monitors video sequences on multiple monitors

Smart video technologies

When video technologies and artificial intelligent work in tandem, they generate insights that can be acted on to improve a building’s safety and security. The benefits extend to everything from intrusion and fire detection all the way to counting and monitoring everyone who enters and leaves.

Cloud and artificial intelligence in building management

Digital Building Twins

We use digital twins to give you a completely new view of the buildings that you own or operate. Historical information, in combination with comprehensive data captured in real time, is applied to create a precise image of your facility that is constantly updated and refined. This technology enables a completely new level of transparency and comprehensive knowledge about a building and how it is operated – the best possible basis for continually optimizing it.

Operator

The use of artificial intelligence to manage buildings is a hotly debated topic in connection with smart buildings and the future of building operation. It’s largest contribution is to increase transparency and efficiency: The more transparent processes and systems are, the better facility managers and technicians are able to understand a building, with all of its interconnections and interdependencies, and optimize its processes. And both sustainability and cost-effectiveness increase as equipment and systems are operated more efficiently. With this, AI is slowly but surely assuming the role of a modern, proactive tool that supports the everyday work of facility managers and technicians. So it’s about time for us to take a closer look: What does AI actually do in the context of building management?

Visualisation: The role of Edge and Cloud in Smart Building

What are a networked Smart Building’s components? Its digital foundation rests on four pillars, namely secure connectivity between the edge and cloud via sensors and IoT gateways, the digital building twin as digital replica of a building, semantically prequalified time series that reveal the overall performance of the building’s systems, and simulation of ideal conditions in the digital building twin. Together they render commercial buildings more transparent. And transparency is key for managing current challenges such as increasing energy costs, reporting requirements, and flexible working time models.

Bosch Research Campus

The most recent developments in artificial intelligence are nothing less than revolutionary. This is mainly because we’re training the new models – referred to as foundation models – differently from before. Today, extremely large datasets are used for this purpose. The models are trained so broadly that they then only need to be parametrized to perform a specific task. For use in commercial buildings, this yields an enormous time saving. It used to be quite laborious to develop AI applications for buildings. After all, every building is unique; large numbers of identical ones don’t roll off an assembly line like cars do. Foundation models make it possible to scale up AI models much faster for specific applications.

Experience our solutions and services in practice

When you choose Bosch, you choose a partner that’s intimately familiar with the needs of a wide range of industries based on many years of hands-on experience as a system integrator in the fields of energy efficiency, building security and automation, digitalization, and IoT.

Employee checks semiconductor production in the clean room

Chip Factory, Dresden

The Bosch “Wafer Fab” in Dresden is one of the world’s most advanced chip production facilities. Numerous technologies developed in-house make it safe, efficient, and sustainable.

Exterior shot of the TÜV SÜD building in Singapore

TÜV SÜD, Singapore

TÜV SÜD has moved into a new location in Singapore. Security and conference systems from Bosch are making it a great place to work

The Spiral in New York

Nove in Munich

Security, comfort and elegance, ideally and intelligently combined: Bosch planned and implemented a fully integrated solution for this intelligent office complex in Munich’s Sendling borough.

Airport Schiphol in Amsterdam

Schiphol Airport near Amsterdam

Airports are also becoming increasingly autonomous and intelligent – for example, by installing a state-of-the-art control room with a customized video management system. You’ll be impressed by this one.

The Spiral in New York City

The Spiral in New York City

Green and smart with a totally pleasant ambiance: this spectacular new skyscraper in New York has been equipped with a topnotch building automation system.

Smart Building basics

For newbies and everyone who wants to know more about digital buildings: Expand your knowledge about Smart Buildings! New technologies always provoke a flurry of questions. In the following, we provide answers to the most important ones.

FAQs

The term “Smart Home” refers exclusively to digitalized housing units and systems installed in them. In residential buildings, intelligent automation can be used to control basic functions such as lighting, sun protection, and heating, and can also include components such as multimedia, household appliances, comfort and convenience functions, and security systems.

“Smart Buildings”, by contrast, are nonresidential buildings such as office complexes, airports, shopping malls, hospitals, schools, and factories. They use intelligent automated systems to meet key requirements such as fire protection, security, and energy conservation. These components are networked in order to optimize building operation while reducing costs and emissions.

The megatrend of digitalization is also impacting how buildings are managed and driving the evolution of Smart Buildings. Germany’s zukunftsInstitut (“Future Institute”) has predicted that by the year 2040, nearly all buildings will be automated and equipped with innovative control systems. In view of current technological and environmental trends, these new possibilities are on course to revolutionize how buildings are managed and run. This makes Smart Buildings very attractive to those who own or manage real estate, while also meeting users’ wishes for resource-conserving, comfortable indoor environments.

While Smart Buildings deliver many benefits, they also pose challenges that need to be mastered. From a technical standpoint, it’s frequently necessary to interconnect a variety of systems to so that they can exchange data. There’s also a need for experienced specialists with the ability to plan and manage the various levels of digital building systems and interpret the data they generate. The investment costs for these new technologies also have to be taken into account, as well as the fact that users’ needs and affinity for technology can vary greatly.

It’s naturally simpler to design new buildings to support smart technologies from the outset. This way it’s easier to digitalize: there are no tenants or preexisting plumbing and cable conduits to deal with. The path for converting an existing building starts with comprehensively networking existing devices, systems, and users and analyzing the data they generate. Once a centrally controlled intelligent platform has been implemented, a huge step has already been taken toward creating an autonomous building. And there are many good reasons to do so, since installing intelligent heating, lighting, or fire alarm systems not only significantly modernizes a building but also prolongs its technical service life.