About us

The Center Smart Commercial Building is a center in the Smart Logistics Cluster on RWTH Aachen Campus. The Center Smart Commercial Building offers a unique platform for businesses and academia, as well as for software and service providers. One of its objectives is the development and conception of smart buildings. Under the motto “increase real estate value”, the Center bundles the vast array of knowledge available on RWTH Aachen Campus and coordinates the cooperation between the involved industry, software and research partners.

RWTH Aachen Campus offers a unique performance spectrum for cooperation in technology-specific clusters, in which know-how and a one-of-a-kind research infrastructure converge. With 16 research clusters on an area of 800,000 square meters, RWTH Aachen Campus offers one of the largest technology-oriented research landscapes in Europe. National and international companies have the opportunity to engage on the campus as members, adding their own research and development capacities to the mix. They gain access to bright young minds and qualified specialists, a completely unique research infrastructure and topic-specific training and further education programs.

Campus GmbH/Steindl

Vision

Buildings will take on new importance in future urban systems and will have to be redesigned in terms of utilization potential and achievable productivity. These aspects are important for investors, operators, planners, architects, technology suppliers and software companies just as important as they are for the facility users.

The motivation for founding the Center Smart Commercial Buildings is based on the premise that the utilization options and the productivity of a facility will be defined by software, and no longer simply by architectural or structural features or location. Artificial intelligence will give rise to “learning buildings” and the communication and interaction with the facility user will have an entirely new technological basis. The Center Smart Commercial Buildings intends to think ahead with regard to these topics and to implement prototypes in an effort to finally reach market-ready solutions.

As part of this effort, the institutes of RWTH Aachen University and relevantly enrolled businesses will collaborate across disciplines to design buildings of the future. Demonstrators will facilitate the translation into scalable solutions. Another task of the center is to test the functionality and interoperability of Building IoT (Internet of Things), to generate technology reports and to drive standardization. These efforts give rise to a need for new training and further education offerings.

The Center Smart Commercial Building serves as a unique crystallization point for the knowledge needed for the creation of future commercial building utilization models. That also includes the deployment of AI and new options for man-machine interactions. The Center will define the required basics and standards and will convey relevant application know-how.

Mission

The interdisciplinary research team will partner up with enrolled members in the Center Smart Commercial Building. Their main focus will be software-based solutions for commercially used facilities of tomorrow. Other core issues for the center are the support of property investors and operators in the opening up and development of new business models and operator concepts.

The strong alliance of academia, businesses from the software and technology sector and the certification and planning sector for facilities, will allow fast developments of market-ready components and solutions. The development process will span the entire spectrum from strategic positioning and the identification of tenant and user requirements, all the way to the development of scalable prototypes to improve technology transfer to the market.

Strategy

Businesses from the property sector must be supported long-term in their participation in the business area “Smart Commercial Buildings” and in the development of new services derived from these developments. The relevant competences to that end will be bundled in the center and future-oriented topics will be developed in close collaboration with these businesses. In these efforts, the Center Smart Commercial Building relies on a unique set of methods and benefits from the RWTH Aachen Campus infrastructure and the proximity to RWTH Aachen University.

Research Topics

The Center Smart Commercial Building focuses its efforts on options for building utilization and productivity. Four areas of activity are derived from this research, which must be taken into account in the development of solutions:

1. Value creation models, because the “smart” commercial buildings will generate entirely new business models between the demand groups tenants and end users, property investors, building operators and service providers for facility management.
2. The importance of software and security will take on new meaning in the communication and interaction with facility users. This will create new challenges for security experts, specialists from IT companies (AR/VR, AI), as well as agile PropTech and startup companies and certification bodies.
3. System development in IoT is an important driver and will engage technology providers, general contractors and IT companies as important know-how providers.
4. Personnel demands in terms of qualifications will change significantly and planners, engineers, architects, FM service providers and building operators or facility developers will face new requirements.