Smart Buildings 2021

SMART

BUILDINGS

Photos: © SERGEY NIVENS / ADOBE STOCK; © LOVEMASK / ADOBE STOCK

Connecting components and the trades

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SMART BUILDINGS: AT THE INFLECTION POINT Market segment offers general contractors and subtrades opportunities for growth and a new, collaborative approach. BY DAVID KENNEDY

I

t is still relatively early days for Canada’s smart building market. Most projects continue to take the conventional route, employing HVAC, electrical, lighting, security and other such systems in their separate silos. But early adopters have begun to look at buildings not as a jumble of interdependent systems, but as the system as a whole, capable of integrating subsystems to improve energy use, guide automation and optimize the wide array of connected components.

Smart building discussions have been ongoing in the construction industry for at least 20 years, according to Sam Boyajian, vice-president of integrated building technology at Modern Niagara. For 15 of those 20, however, it was little more than talk, with owners not typically ready to take the plunge, he said during a panel discussion with three industry experts hosted by On-

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Site, HPAC and Electrical Business magazines this March.

“Now,” he says, “I would argue that the owners and the developers have sort of leapfrogged the engineering community, and now they’re starting to pull the rest of us along because now they’re demanding it.”

“We’re at a bit of an inflection point,” Boyajian adds.

In Canada, governments building hospitals have been among the first movers, partly because smart building systems offer the most discernible benefits to larger facilities.

Certain forward-looking private owners are also beginning to embrace smart buildings, Colin Flock, vice-president of operations for EllisDon’s facilities services division, says. More are expected to follow as early adopters quantify the energy savings and other benefits offered by their smart buildings.

“In the next 10 years, it’ll just be a different landscape, Flock says.

Erica Brabon, the director of energy and sustainability for the facility services division at Black & McDonald also expects adoption in the building market to move quickly, though what will be considered “smart” a decade from now will be a moving target, she says.

“Smart building initially was the connectivity, the energy efficiency and being able to trend and capture all this data,” Brabon says. “But now, over the past year, expectations have changed.

We might want to track occupancy patterns, we might want to track indoor air quality, people might want assurances that the air changes per hour in their space have been achieved.”

The opportunities for contractors are considerable, though they will need to be comfortable with quickly evolving technology and a moving set of goal posts.

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“The software’s out there, and the partnerships are out there... It’s more of a cultural thing in the contracting community. My only piece of advice is don’t double down on the status quo.

This is happening, and that’s just the way it’s going to be.”

PHOTO CREDIT: MONSITJ / GETTY IMAGES PLUS

– Sam Boyajian, Modern Niagara

ON-SITE ADJUSTMENTS Technology adoption in construction, particularly of cloud-based software, has gone through step change between 2020 and 2021, largely due to the pandemic. While many GCs and subs are already using sophisticated tools for overseeing their projects, those behind the curve will likely need to catch up to enter the smart building market.

“If you’re not using them already, I would say that that could create a lag in the types of projects that you’re working on,” Brabon says, adding that Black & McDonald gets a major boost from employing technologies that bridge the construction and operations phases.

“It’s a huge benefit to us playing both of those roles… to be able to take advantage of some of the technologies or cloud-based tools that are used during construction, to make for a very easy hand-off into operations, to better understand what the facility use requirements are, how we can change that and update that over time,” she says.

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Among other examples, Brabon points to photo tagging, which takes much of the manual work out of progress updates, as a key piece of technology that is streamlining work on-site and simplifying integration when subsystems of smart buildings are forced together.

Boyajian does not see the technology curve as being overly steep for contractors, but says the slow-to-change mentality of some in construction can put up barriers.

“The software’s out there, and the partnerships are out there, and the folks that do this for a living are out there,” he says. “I think it’s more of a cultural thing in the contracting community. My only piece of advice is don’t double down on the status quo. This is happening, and that’s just the way it’s going to be.”

To tackle smart buildings projects, all three panellists also stress the need for a collaborative approach.

From a GC perspective, Flock says putting together the partners and trade groups that understand the technology, as well as the end goal, is vital.

“You’re no longer mechanical and electrical, you’re like one team building a system,” he says.

BUILDING TOWARD INTEGRATION Flock oversaw the Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital’s transition from the construction phase to the operations phase. Now, roughly six years into operations under EllisDon, the relatively early smart hospital has pro-

vided the contractor with a range of takeaways for improvements during both phases. During commissioning in particular, Flock says, better information will help the company find efficiencies in the future.

“Although the commissioning is slightly more complicated with a smart building because you do have that integration piece, and you’re treating the building as a system, you do have a lot more data,” he says. “So from a GC perspective, or if you’re managing a sub, you don’t just rely on these tick box exercises of ‘Yes the system works,’ you actually have proof and you have data and you can collect that data over a longer period of time.”

Greater scheduling and budget certainty is another area smart buildings are leading the way.

“You can look at certain indicators along the way to predict even things like project schedule, project budget that normally would be maybe guesswork in the past,” Brabon says. “Now you can look at updated progress reports that are happening in real-time, versus material insight, versus progress made to date, to predict how the project will progress along the way.”

Meanwhile, for Boyajian, the ultimate cost-saving is delivering a building that comes close to running itself – that means fewer trips to smooth out problems and performing less maintenance.

To get to this stage, he says, contractors need to focus on integration.

SMART BUILDINGS 2021

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PHOTO CREDIT: JUSTOCKER / ADOBE STOCK

< SMART BUILDINGS

“A lot of the times where a smart building ends up disappointing the people that are moving into it, it’s not because the technology can’t do it, it’s not because it wasn’t designed properly, it’s because there’s that extra step that never existed before,” he says. “Now we need to actually sit down and say, when this happens in this system, that happens in that system. That last step of integration, if you skip that, basically what you have is a really fancy building that does nothing any different than it would have if you built it the other way.”

Flock agrees, noting the integration of building systems is “critical.”

Coupled with integrating the systems at the end of the construction process, he adds, is handing off the prodigious amount of data to the operations team, which is waiting to pick up the baton and begin running the smart systems the way they were designed to be used.

MAKING USE OF THE DATA Generating actionable data from the 4

SMART BUILDINGS 2021

“You’re treating the building as a system [and] you do have a lot more data. So, from a GC perspective... you don’t just rely on these tick box exercises of ‘Yes the system works,’ you actually have proof and you have data and you can collect that data over a longer period of time.”

– Colin Flock, EllisDon

host of connected components and sensors is one aspect of smart buildings that continues to evolve.

“It’s an unbelievable amount of data,” Flock says, adding that owners are continually trying to figure out which heaps of data they actually need and what they are able to do with it.

“In the case of the Oakville hospital, it’s coming on six years since substantial completion and we’re still finding information that we’re collecting that we can use for something else,” he says.

Platforms that use data for predictive maintenance, fault detection and remote diagnostics, among other areas, are maturing quickly. And in many ways, building systems are simply catching up with advances elsewhere.

“You can order a pizza and you know exactly where the guy is on your street before he gets there,” Boyajian says, “and yet you call your HVAC contractor and they probably will show up and you have no idea who’s coming, or when they’re coming.”

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“Smart building initially was the connectivity, the energy efficiency and being able to trend and capture all this data. But now, over the past year, expectations have changed. We might want to track occupancy patterns; we might want to track in-door air quality.”

– Erica Brabon, Black & McDonald

With smart buildings and a “hard push” toward making use of the data they can provide, Boyajian anticipates this uncertainty becoming a thing of the past sooner rather than later. But he acknowledges the industry still has considerable ground to make up.

“As an industry right now, we’re the kid with the cell phone that takes 700 pictures and doesn’t delete any of them,

and you only really needed one of those pictures,” he says.

“So, I think we need to figure out having the mountains of data is great, you’ve got to do something with it, you’ve got to figure out what’s useful, and sometimes sifting through the mountain of data is harder than sifting through 10 data points.”

Quantifying the scale of the data

pileup, Brabon says some clients get excited about interval data, wanting updates as frequently as every 15 seconds.

“Well, a system doesn’t change that much in 15 seconds,” she says. “So do we really need that, and then again what are we going to do with it?

"Their excitement about data is there, but I think that we have to decide now what we’re going to do with the data and make sure that we’re getting the value out of it and not just keeping and storing it.”

In time, the panellists anticipate machine learning will be picking up the slack by filtering out unnecessary information, but currently, as in the rest of the developing market there is more work to be done. <> David Kennedy is the editor of On-Site magazine.

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SMART BUILDINGS 2021

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DIGITIZING HEALTHCARE DELIVERY The new Cortellucci Vaughan Hospital provides a case study in collaboration and smart construction. BY DOUG PICKLYK

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owhere has the trend towards optimizing digital integration within a building been more realized than in the healthcare sector, where large public-private-partnerships provide the scope and resources to combine leading-edge clinical technology with intelligent mechanical and electrical services to provide the ultimate in patient-centred care.

At the same time, these billion-dollar projects enable general contractors and their trade partners to flex new muscles and incorporate the best of new building techniques to provide workflow and scheduling efficiencies.

The new Cortellucci Vaughan Hospital is the first hospital built in the City of Vaughan—located immediately north of

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Toronto—and it is the first all-new hospital constructed in Ontario in more than 30 years.

In late October, 2016, Infrastructure Ontario and Mackenzie Health awarded the Plenary Health team a contract valued at approximately $1.3 billion to design, build, finance and maintain the 1.2 million-sq. ft. hospital on a 40-acre greenfield site, with a completion target of 2020.

The design/build team for the project was led by PCL Construction, a group very familiar with P3 healthcare projects in the province. Their primary construction partners included Modern Niagara on the mechanical side and the Plan Group on the electrical.

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PHOTO: TOM ARBAN

DESIGN COLLABORATION

SMART VISION The client, Mackenzie Health, identified their Smart Vision for the hospital early on. “Smart devices, or smart technology and applications, are integrated into our everyday lives with smart phones for example, so we asked ‘How can we bring this technology into the hospital environment and give that kind of experience to our patients and also to our physicians and clinicians?’” says Felix Zhang, Chief Technology Officer with Mackenzie Health.

Achieving the vision would require a high level of integration, combining the hospital’s IT network with the building systems. Together with PCL and experts in information, communication, and automation technology (ICAT), the client was able to design and develop the converged network backbone that props up the completed hospital.

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“The P3 model requires a lot of collaboration on the front end,” notes Andre Bohren, construction manager with PCL who oversaw the Cortellucci Vaughan Hospital (CVH) project. “We really do have to build our partnership with our mechanical and electrical contractors, and in this case an additional third-party on the IT side (Compugen).”

Because connectivity and intelligence is integrated with so many of the different devices and systems in a hospital setting, a high level of team work early on in the design was required to ensure the physical infrastructure would be in place to connect all the pieces together.

“The level of collaboration was very high on this project due to the fact that the smart hospital vision touched all of the major systems,” adds Steve George, construction director (ICAT) with Plan Group. Focus group meetings were held weekly during the design phase and all stakeholders including the hospital and PCL along with the trades were included in order to understand all of the inputs and outputs involved in the converged network.

“In terms of the base infrastructure of this building, it’s not that different from other P3s in concept, but then we do have all this integrated mechanical that’s also speaking more to the client’s front-end system, which make this a bit smarter than other builds,” notes Bohren.

“There’s more user interfaces, like through patient iPads that can control lighting, the blinds, room temperature and more, and that’s more ‘smart’ than I’ve seen on past projects,” he adds.

Peter Cole, district building systems manager with PCL, has been working on hospital P3 projects for over 10 years, and he’s witnessed the evolution of digital integration leading to today’s ICAT sophistication. “Ten years ago we were just touching on network design. We put

a network in a hospital and we called it IT, and then it grew into ICT [information and communication technology], and then all of the sudden they added the automation.”

Bohren recalls the first major hospital project he worked on and installing copper lines for fax machines. “And that was supposed to be one of the more advanced hospitals trending towards paperless. Fast forward three or four hospitals later, and this is the most I’ve ever seen in terms of a hospital venturing into paperless and a userfacing system to this degree. Thats what’s unique at CVH compared to other hospital projects I’ve been involved with in Ontario.”

COLLABORATION TOOLS Today a smart build requires digital technology at all stages, and PCL has built a lot of capability around BIM [building information modeling] technology for collaboration on design documentation.

The trade partners can access the 3D BIM model, and then they can pull out and add pieces where required.

According to Mark Sayers, construction manager for Modern Niagara and another industry veteran who has worked on P3 hospitals with these partners in the past, this was the first major project incorporating 3D modeling early on. The construction team took the design-level 3D drawings from the architect and consulting engineers and added the construction level of detail. “That whole process, especially with it being done using the same software model, was unique. It’s now becoming more standard in the industry, but definitely at the start of 2017, it was the first job I was involved with that did that,” says Sayers.

PCL also uses the a BIM field system for communicating progress. “And we’ve layered on PCL’s own services with a [Microsoft] SharePoint backbone and it gives us a seamless window into those SMART BUILDINGS 2021

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PHOTO: COURTESY MACKENZIE HEALTH

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Central Utility Plant (CUP) at the new hospital, located outside the main building.

things. I’ve got to say, the collaboration piece in these tools, quality checking, progress photographs, is all shared in real time,” says Bohren.

PCL also has an online delivery tool used to communicate with the client in terms of scheduling deliveries on-site to optimize time, and they use a cloudbased PDF system for collaboration on document review so everyone can do their shop drawing reviews in real time together.

CENTRAL UTILITY PLANT Sequentially, one of the first elements completed on-site was the Central Utility Plant (CUP), a structure that houses the mechanical room along with power distribution and back-up generator. Typically utility plants are positioned in the penthouse or midway up a building, the CUP was constructed on ground level outside of the main building, providing multiple smart benefits. “We were able to start building the CUP in advance and in parallel, and start adding in critical systems such as generators, boilers and the major electrical distribution, all while we were still putting up the building,” says Bohren.

Commissioning on the CUP was also started well ahead of the main building.

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“It was a real advantage for us,” says Sayers from Modern Niagara. “We usually have to wait for the entire building to be built before we can start working on the plant, and then it becomes a critical path item at the back end of the schedule.

“And with it being in its own building it became a unique feature. The architect incorporated glass into the chiller room, so you can look from the hospital and see right into the chiller room, and I haven’t seen a project where a mechanical facility has been featured like that. Usually it’s a back of house item that only mechanical contractors get excited over.”

From the client’s perspective, building the CUP outside of the main building saved on valuable real estate inside the hospital allowing more room for patient care, and it also isolated any noise or heat generated at the plant.

PREFABRICATED MODULAR DATA CENTER Another element placed outside the main building is the hospital’s data centre. The brains of the hospital information systems and an essential piece of the building’s operations, the data centre was positioned close to the CUP, convenient for connecting with power and cooling sources.

Mackenzie Health elected to go with a prefabricated solution that consists of two identical container-like enclosures that were built and completely outfitted at a factory in Southwestern Ontario and then transported to the site.

“We were involved in the planning of the data centre with the supplier based on a specific set of specifications from the client, and we did regular inspections in the factory as it was being built,” says Steve George with Plan Group.

Once on-site the team performed some finishing work from an electrical and IT standpoint, including connections to all of the main electrical feeders. The enclosures have their own self-contained uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and backup cooling systems. The enclosures are twinned, and for additional redundancy they are connected by a fiber network to a data center located within another Mackenzie Health hospital in nearby Richmond Hill.

Smart benefits of positioning the modular data centre outside of the building, aside from space savings inside, include flexibility for future expansion or even downsizing. “Right now everyone's talking about cloud services, and who knows 10 or 20 years Continued on p10 ON-SITE | HPAC | ELECTRICAL BUSINESS

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< SMART BUILDINGS down the road we may leverage more cloud services and may not require a huge outside data centre anymore,” says Zhang from Mackenzie Health.

“It’s much more cost-effective to do that if it’s outside of the building.”

For construction efficiencies, contractors like PCL seek opportunities to incorporate modular elements into buildings. This project included some 290 prefabricated patient washroom pods, each around 100 sq. ft. and weighing approximately 5,000 lbs.

“There was an early collaboration with the design team and our trade partners to figure out how to streamline the washroom designs, reducing the number of variations required,” says Bohren.

Once the pods were designed, the trades worked in PCL’s controlled factory environment. There are obvious scheduling benefits, working in parallel to the main build and not having to wait for slabs to be poured and the building enclosed. Once delivered, the trades also performed the final connections on-site.

Another example of an off-site modular project included the pre-assembly of all the large chilled water, heating water and condenser water pipes onto structural steel pipe racks. This was performed in Modern Niagara’s fabrication facility. The pipe racks were then shipped on trucks and lowered into a tunnel connecting services from the CUP to the hospital.

COMPLETION DURING COVID PCL and its partners hit important milestones along the construction path and achieved substantial completion of the project in August 2020, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

The high level of collaboration among all partners, that began at the onset of the project and continued throughout, 10

SMART BUILDINGS 2021

PHOTOS: COURTESY PCL

MODULAR CONSTRUCTION

290 washroom pods were constructed in PCL’s Agile modular construction facility. (photo taken prior to the COVID-19 pandemic).

Completed washroom pods shipped and installed on-site.

proved critical when the pandemic was first announced.

Safety precautions were implemented on-site, and there were no COVID outbreaks. And after close to 4 million worker hours completed throughout the project there was not a single loss time incident.

“That speaks a lot to the professionalism of the skilled people we had working on the project, and the safety culture on the project,” says Bohren.

Officially opened on February 7, 2021, the hospital is currently supporting Ontario’s fight against COVID by

providing critical and acute care support. Once the pandemic is over, the health care facility will serve as a fullservice community hospital with the capacity to operate 350 beds with shell space to add more floors of additional capacity.

According to Felix Zhang of Mackenzie Health, the greatest reward he has experienced so far has been the high level of positive feedback from the patients—fulfilling the ultimate goal of the organization’s smart vision. <> Doug Picklyk is editor of HPAC magazine.

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