Azure services including Digital Twins enable firm’s customers to create smart buildings
Elly Yates-Roberts |
Bosch Building Technologies, a division of Bosch Group, has been using Microsoft solutions to build energy- and money-saving solutions for its internal operations and for customers.
The company has created Energy Platform, a web-based tool to monitor and analyse energy consumption in real time, manage business processes and provide actionable insights for operators.
The platform uses Microsoft Azure services including Azure Functions, Azure Data Lake, Azure Data Factory and Azure Cosmos DB, which enable customers to read, transmit and analyse data so that they can make informed decisions to improve energy and resource efficiency. At one of its own plants, Bosch is saving up to €1.2 million each year through the solution.
Bosch also created a solution for smart buildings that can monitor and collect data to make decisions for heating, air-conditioning and ventilation systems, analyse building energy consumption, and optimise building functions. Building Intelligence as a Service uses Bosch’s own Connected Building Services software and Azure Digital Twins to create a contextually aware solution and digital models. It allows users to query data from whole rooms and spaces to build digital models of the physical building environment.
“A single, integrated digital twin makes it possible to depict how a building’s systems interact with it and each other, something that until recently was only possible for individual systems and only with a laborious manual process,” said Andreas Mauer, a chief technology officer at Bosch Building Technologies. “We added Azure Digital Twins to give our customers more granular insights into how they’re consuming energy – the usage patterns, the anomalies – so that they can quickly make smart changes in their buildings.”