Developing smart campuses — A working model

Abstract

In 2008 Birmingham City University (BCU) embarked on an ambitious new city centre campus development scheme. The scheme is materialising into two new campuses of circa 18000 and 24000 square metres respectively; as the main part of a £180m investment by BCU. The first campus is open and operating, the second is being built and due to open in September 2015. From the initial planning stages of the developments BCU wanted the campuses to be “intelligent-buildings”. This paper will explain and document how BCU have interwoven “intelligence” into its new campuses to improve business-processes, reduce energy use and carbon emissions and enhance the occupant experience. The focus of this paper will be upon integrating multi-protocol business and building-systems through an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to compliment an existing Service Orientated Architecture (SOA). The result is a university-wide suite of systems that are scalable, extensible, integrated and orchestrated. The resulting cost-savings and service enhancements will also be examined and discussed. In addition a roadmap of further developments will be outlined to compliment the developments already achieved.