OTTAWA — The Continental Automated Buildings Association (CABA) announced the recipients of its inaugural Building Intelligence Quotient (BiQ) Awards. The annual awards program has been developed to recognize property owners and operators whose buildings achieve the highest rank using CABA’s building technology assessment tool.

The 2012 Gold winners are:

• Comcast Center, the tallest building in Philadelphia and the 15th tallest building in the United States.

• MaRS Centre, a medical innovation and technology research center located in Toronto.

• Ottawa Paramedic Service Headquarters, a facility from which all paramedic operations and training are consolidated in Canada’s national capital.

The 2012 Silver winner is:

• Three World Financial Center, a skyscraper in Lower Manhattan, New York City.

CABA said its BiQ ranking tool has three functions. It serves as: a means to evaluate and measure the “value” of intelligent building performance; a design guide for integration of building intelligence in new building projects; and a building automation retrofit action plan tool.

The tool allows property owners and managers to rate a building’s intelligence and provides design guidance to ensure that all relevant issues are considered when making a choice of subsystems and their level of integration. Owners and developers with multiple properties can also use the BiQ tool to assess and compare the building intelligence systems in their portfolio.

As more buildings are BiQ verified, point scores are aggregated in an anonymous database, enabling users to analyze how their building intelligence design performs in relation both to the median and to buildings that are similar in terms, type and region. Because the assessment is online, owners and managers have the ability to change input up to a year, with an option to extend. This allows users to keep their assessment up-to-date as the building intelligence changes through the project delivery stages as buildings are retrofitted.

The modular assessment generates a report that provides benchmark rankings as well as recommendations for improvements in the following categories: building automation; communication systems; annunciation, security, and control systems; facility management applications; and building structure and systems.

All building assessments are ranked and the top four receive recognition through annual BiQ Awards.

“Building intelligence results in higher property values, improved comfort, security, flexibility, and reliability while reducing costs and increasing productivity,” said Ronald J. Zimmer, CABA president and CEO. “CABA is proud to showcase this year’s award recipients who are actively demonstrating the advantage of assessing building technology.”

For more information about the BiQ tool and BiQ Awards, go to www.caba.org/biq.

Publication date: 01/30/2012