Facilities leaders faced with curtailing rising costs and meeting sustainability targets while keeping building occupants comfortable and maintaining climate control for labs and other sensitive spaces need increasingly sophisticated systems to achieve their goals. These systems justify themselves based on hard-dollar returns on investment. But looking at them only through that lens misses a significant opportunity to contribute to the institution’s educational mission.
Campus physical plants that have become internets of things — requiring cloud-based management, machine learning, and visualization tools — could serve as more than unseen controllers of the classroom environment. They could be the classroom. Mechanical engineering students could explore the plant with managers and engineers to see how a cutting-edge HVAC system works, for example, and visualization tools could bring the plant into the classroom. The trove of data these systems produce could also give data science students meaningful analytics projects.