Facilities Management

Facilities management in municipal buildings involves climate control, energy conservation, specialized water functions and testing (e.g. ice creation, hot water heating, grey water reuse), lighting maintenance, fire safety, and security management to control access and entry. Most building facilities will have full-time staff operating to provide oversight, maintenance, and control over these systems. However, the demand of maintenance schedules, costs of undertaking and implementing energy audits, and complexity of building automation systems (BAS), result in many buildings prioritizing only the most pressing operations with optimization needs lagging.

Facilities management for outdoor structures includes the maintenance of parks and outdoor washrooms, outdoor recreation facilities (e.g. swimming and ice skating), servicing recycling and waste bins, and clearing transit shelters. Municipalities will typically staff hourly wage workers to upkeep these many of these facilities, which limits the ability to integrate enhanced maintenance monitoring efforts. Smart city solutions can bridge this gap by outfitting structures with sensors to monitor facilities and provide feedback that prioritizes deployment of staff while optimizing maintenance schedules.

Considerations: capacity and resource limits, engagement and feedback, and monitoring outcomes

Applications and Solutions: Data-Driven Building Inspections

The primary sources of data for scheduling building inspections include regular audit cycles, client complaints, BAS alerts to troubleshoot system failures, or scheduled maintenance and monitoring. Data-driven inspections can anticipate facility management needs derived from data insights rather than after-the-fact problem-solving.

In buildings, connecting sensors with BAS software can coordinate live monitoring with system performance objectives. In outdoor facilities, integrating IoT sensors into infrastructure can reduce maintenance costs, enable targeted servicing, and monitor facility usage.

Technologies

Building sensors – Carbon dioxide and temperature monitoring can be coupled with HVAC systems to automate ventilation, heating and cooling needs. Daylight sensors can be connected with lighting controls to fluctuate lighting needs based on available daylight.

Outdoor sensors – Sensors built into urban infrastructure collects use data on outdoor infrastructure. For example, sensors built into waste bins detect when garbage and recycling bins need to be emptied. This can direct maintenance workers to high-use areas and to identify where facility needs are the greatest for locating new bins. Sensors built into benches can track usage and help relocation to optimize use.

IoT surveys – Citizen feedback on public washroom conditions can enable restocking and cleaning efforts and provide useful data on use frequency of outdoor facilities. This data can be collected in many ways, either through an app or a digital device installed onsite.

Open Data – Sharing municipal data on facility performance metrics can encourage community engagement and development of targeted solutions.

Managing Liability Issues

Privacy

Issues.

⚠️ Technology should be used to determine drive data-based decisions to reduce costs and to improve, measure, and track outcomes of facility maintenance and services, not to invade personal and public spaces or to encourage monetization of user data.

Managing issues.

✅ Capture data impersonally. Record feedback and comments in an anonymous way that cannot be attributed to individuals.

✅ Choose the technology appropriate to the task. Low-tech solutions in some contexts may be preferable to high-tech ones, consider the non-technical benefits of an activity and whether the technology is enhancing the outcomes and protecting privacy or if it is obstructing the development of trust and community.

✅ Data-fuzzing. Employ data-fuzzing techniques to preserve privacy. For example, do not include start and end points in route data so that a particular route cannot be traced to an individual. Similarly, fuzzing data of sensitive areas provides an additional layer of security for personal information.

✅ De-identify at the source. Many camera technologies allow for faces to be blurred at collection. If there is an alternative solution that does not use cameras, opt for that instead.

✅ De-identify as soon as possible. If personal information absolutely must be collected, it should be stripped away as soon as possible.

✅ Limit data collection to only that which is needed. Collection strategies such as bicycle numbers and heat maps rather than individual-specific routes avoid engaging more serious privacy concerns.

✅ Ensure that partners or contractors follow collection restrictions. When purchasing data from private companies, ensure that they are upholding their own privacy obligations under relevant legislation.

✅ Follow good privacy practices.

Security

Issues.

⚠️ Security issues emerge from the hardware and software components of technology. The location of hardware in urban infrastructure may be vulnerable to damage from weather, wear and tear, and vandalism.

Managing issues.

✅ Security added to urban spaces to monitor smart devices may magnify privacy issues rather than address the original problem of servicing facilities. A balance needs to be struck in terms of how much security is needed, that is contextualized in a given community and informed by community engagement and feedback.

✅ Many of the same solutions to privacy issues will address security issues: e.g., de-identify at source if possible, or as soon as possible if otherwise. Where personal information is collected, it should be held in a secure location.

✅ Access should be limited to those with a need to use the information.

✅ Follow good security practices.

Procurement

Issues.

⚠️ Community based insights created by third-party developers may thwart municipal efforts or identify more costly solutions required for procurement.

Managing issues.

✅ Share data using open license with terms of use for third-party developers. Embed contract terms if directly procuring market data that connects insights with measurable outcomes.

✅ Follow sound procurement practices.

Operations

Issues.

⚠️ Staffing resources for facilities maintenance is often constrained by cost and time limitations. Engaging community feedback can support open data initiatives and the development of app-based solutions enabling as rating systems, user-contributed data, and automated municipal alerts.

Managing issues.

✅ Sharing de-identified data early can support maintenance cycles and allow municipalities to improve services without investing significantly on embedded hardware where it may not be cost-effective or necessary.