12. Twenty-First-Century Smart Facilities Management: Ambient Networking in Intelligent Office Buildings

Ambient Technologies, such as beacons, sensors, and other similar smart devices, can be used in work places such as offices to determine everything from whether an employee is in the building, to where they are located, and whether a booked conference room is actually in use. This is part of a larger smart office strategy involving digital facilities management solutions that respond to modern methods and manners of working, as well as smart building technologies providing digital ecosystems that allow workers empowerment through personalization and automation. This new data-driven environment contributes to energy efficiency, optimized space utilization, enhanced workplace experience and occupants’ comfort. However, all of this requires standards for data interoperability and seamless networking. Facilities managers are also now taking on a different role as to how they visualize new smarter office spaces, where it is expected that new environments would support their inhabitants intelligently by promoting easier management, better efficiency, increased productivity, and enabling the buildings to be part of the creation process for design and project development. There are obviously numerous sensitivity issues with respect to gathering, storing, maintaining, and processing of the ambient environment data in terms of user privacy, security, and possibility of potential data misuse. In this chapter, we discuss the new approaches to facilities management in terms of developing smarter office spaces, embedded with devices employing Ambient Intelligence (AmI) . We also articulate cases and examples of ambient technologies implementation.