AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
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“ My role balances the need to improve the physical development of the campus today while setting up frameworks to maintain that into the future ”
— Chris Grange , Chief Operating Officer , Australian National University
The Acton campus is enormous , with over 200 buildings across 145 hectares of land directly adjoining the Canberra CBD , “ so actually knowing rather than guessing what ’ s going on around the campus is a really important part of deploying technology ”, says Grange . He notes the significance in recent years of focusing on analysis and information management – whether measuring the number of students going into classes , or deploying metering technologies to measure real-time campus usage of electricity , gas and water . “ We ’ ve seen improvements to our analytics platform in terms of understanding student behaviours , perceptions , evaluations and other metrics . One of the key changes for us has been to use data to inform decision making within the university . When you apply that to the physical fabric of the campus , you ’ re really moving into the Internet of Things ( IoT ), with sensors and smart devices .”
Universities are complex organisations , requiring many individual pieces of technology to support disparate functions . One of the biggest challenges for ANU has been getting those pieces of technology to talk to each other and share information in real time . “ We ’ ve made a considerable investment in doing that ,” asserts Nicki Middleton , Director of Facilities and Services . ANU ’ s technologically-enabled smart infrastructure network uses an open source communication and control data network within the university to provide demand management capability through a Building Monitoring and Control System ( BMCS ), interfacing with sensors , building services and appliances . “ Ultimately we ’ re aiming for smart buildings which are sensor filled
NOVEMBER 2019