Weekly Briefing

International Towers Sydney, Barangaroo South: A New Benchmark for Smart Buildings

Developed and built by Lendlease, Barangaroo South is Australia's largest urban renewal development project since the 2000 Olympics and one of the most significant waterfront transformations currently underway anywhere in the world. From the outset, Lendlease had a vision to make Barangaroo South one of the most converged, connected smart building projects in the world, proving that intelligent building design can enhance the tenant experience, mitigate energy costs, reduce operations and maintenance expenses while setting new benchmarks for sustainability and overall financial performance.

Comprising three iconic commercial office towers and a total built-up area of 3 million square feet in Australia’s first carbon-neutral community, International Towers Sydney forms the core of the Barangaroo South development. This mixed use, commercial, residential and retail development had the following project goals:

• Tenant empowerment

• Operational efficiency

• Management by exception

• Sustainability

• Energy efficiency

• Comparing actual to designed and modeled performance

• Capturing building data for current and future analysis

Its main challenges were typical for a development that was on a quest for the highest levels of sustainability and operational efficiency. They had to integrate multiple building systems from separate vendors using a variety of protocols into a cohesive whole. Change management had to be facilitated to ensure continuity of operations. They also addressed evolving systems to deliver real efficiencies for each stakeholder’s business requirements.

The result is that the International Towers Sydney has set a new benchmark for smart building management and innovation in tenant services. What makes this possible is an Open Building System Integration (OBSI) platform based on the iviva software, which provides an unprecedented level of integration between systems and business processes across the three towers. Because it is an open data platform, OBSI serves multiple stakeholders including tenants, building management teams, engineering and commissioning teams and contractors. User interfaces and operational dashboards are optimized for different users, based on their role, thereby simplifying interactions and allowing them to efficiently manage by exception. More importantly, there is easy access to data and control by tenants in real-time in one location with one log-in and one graphics interface.

With OBSI, tenants in International Towers Sydney can manage selected services themselves within their tenancies, such as after-hours air conditioning, access card management and comfort control as well as view key information about the floors they occupy such as thermographs, lighting, security, utility consumption, waste and recycling, occupancy levels and alarms. There are over 200 daily users of the OBSI from the precincts key stakeholders including property managers, service providers, commissioning agents, tenants, security, sustainability and finance departments.

The Integration of over 1,000,000 real-time I/O points across multiple building systems including BMCS, Lighting, Access Control, CCTV, Hydraulics, Fire and Metering over a wide array of protocols such as BACnet, MODBUS, OPC, KNX, SQL and web services allows building management teams to use OBSI for their day-to-day operations. This includes the monitoring and control of building systems; viewing of live and recorded CCTV footage; managing critical alarms; scheduling systems; monitoring comfort levels; managing incidents and managing cardholder access, to name a few.

OBSI also serves contractors and engineering/commissioning teams for commissioning and tuning activities and for the continuous improvement of integrated building systems’ performance.

The system also allows for rapid problem solving through the ability to show issues versus compliance at precinct level with the ability to then drill down to building level, floor, zone, equipment group and equipment item and its independent data point trended history.

International Towers Sydney is an excellent showcase of the next generation smart buildings and how it uses innovative automation and technology to keep pace with the continuing evolution and growth of the workplace of the future and the way we live, work and play.

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