Stirling Smart Hub

Stirling council had a vision of a centralized platform to collect all the data generated by their buildings and assets so that they could check their performance. They were also concerned that the renewables installations were not performing as expected.

As for several other local authorities the main problem was that, even for this relatively small sample (30 schools in the pilot) there were 7 different data sources. For example data from utilities was in CSV format and received by email or stored in FTP sites, the building management system (BMS) was not accessible from outside the buildings, etc.

The first stage of the project was spent creating an independent data layer between the various systems and hardware and the IES time series database. Connectors were created with each data source, the data was normalized and finally uploaded on the IES cloud.

A big challenge was the inevitable data loss because of a variety of reasons. We used machine learning to fill the data gaps in the time series and present usable data to the users and the apps layer.

Dashboards were created based on interviews with typical users. The most challenging part was to show only relevant in formation. The project was very successful. The council has renewed the subscription twice since, and the same model was applied in two subsequent bids that IES won.