Low-cost access to global communication networks and the omnipresence of smartphones and the IoT are hurling us into a digital economy in which “everything and everyone is connected, all the time.”
The media and opinion leaders extol the merits of intelligent objects and buildings. It seems everything is now “smart” in one way or another. To be sure, between now and 2020 we are set to witness a massive surge in the Internet of Things and smart connected buildings; however the reality is that these devices will be of limited intelligence.
Reminder: intelligence is the ability to independently adapt to one’s environment through successive learning, and to be capable of anticipating.
Obviously, most of this intelligence will not be embedded in actual objects or buildings; it will be situated in the cloud. It would be utopian, both from an economic and an energy perspective, to imagine that each and every object could possibly be equipped with enough sensors to perceive their entire surrounding environment.
In its “Web 2030” study, France’s Commissariat général à la stratégie et à la prospective (commissioner general for strategy and forecasting) estimates that 50 billion objects will potentially be “tagged” by the year 2020, effectively giving them a unique identity on the Web and a form of remote intelligence.
The role of so-called “smart” infrastructures will be to guarantee a permanent connection between physical objects and the virtual world (ISP, GPRS, Edge, 3G/4G/5G, LoRa, Sigfox).
Such “augmented” buildings will become the platform for value-creating services, eventually even negotiating for themselves the sale or procurement of the energy which they produce or consume.
In the future, buildings will not merely represent an operating expense, they will also be a source of revenue.
Ubiant has defined its roadmap in order to meet the challenge of France’s Positive Energy Territories (referred to as TEPOS) in 2020. For this purpose, it has placed energy performance and user experience at the core of its solutions.
In an increasingly decentralized world in which billions of connected objects will have to work together to attain a common goal, Ubiant’s analysis is that only distributed artificial intelligence, associated with an innovative approach on user interfaces, will be able to effectively respond to all these new challenges.
This conviction is consolidated by the arrival of renewable energies, which are inherently decentralized and which will oblige energy companies to revise their energy management and marketing paradigm; ultimately, this is the sector’s biggest economic challenge.
