Even the walls have ears now

Press, 19 February 1986, Page 38

Even the walls have ears now

By

PAT SWEET

of the

“Observer” In an early “Avengers” episode Steed is trapped in a building which constantly outwits his endeavours to escape by closing doors and sending lifts away.

That concept of the "intelligent building” is no longer pure fantasy. Offices are filling up with an array of computer services, while down in the basement building maintenance staff rely on computerised monitoring systems to check heating, ventilation and security “Intelligent buildings” combine those computing and monitoring systems. The data highways which run through the office word-processing system, the data-processing system and the digital telephone exchange become the building’s electronic nervous system. Remote sensors for fire, security, heating and ventilation become the building’s nerve ends. If, for example, there is a fire on the 20th floor, the fire control sensors detect the smoke, send a message to the central computer brain, and the building reacts as a body would.

The telephone exchange automatically dials the emergency services and the central computer orders the lifts to the ground floor. Stairwell doors are automatically unlocked, fire doors closed and a prerecorded voice message directs staff to safe routes while the ventilation system automatically adjusts to control smoke and fumes.

Other systems show who is in the vicinity of

the fire and lock out the unwary, but firemen fighting the blaze can use the internal telephone network to update the fire command station in the lobby on the spread of the fire.

Around 50 such buildings have been developed since 1983 in the United States, with the most ambitious project a $4 billion development on 1000 acres of Harbour Bay Isle in San Francisco Bay. It includes offices and some homes wired for shop-at-home services.

The United Kingdom’s first fully fledged “intelligent building,” Rank Zerox’s corporate headquarters at Marlow, Buckinghamshire, opens this northern summer. Each of the company’s 800 “knowledge workers" has his or her own Zerox work station, linked by 3000 miles of Ethernet local area network cabling.

This will allow secretaries and executives to send letters and documents anywhere around the building, link to printers and document storage and use the work station for telex facilities. A central control and monitoring system (CCMS) will control the environment, monitoring maintenance requirements, seeing that surplus heat from electronic equipment is redistributed, and ensuring that the building temperature comes down at night while also allowing designated areas to be kept warm if someone is working late.

Rank Zerox employees are to be linked with external services such as

British Telecom’s Kilostream and Megastream networks for transferring data around the United Kingdom, and there are satellite links to Rank Zerox’s United States headquarters for video conferences.

Rank Zerox’s investment in its new building is not cheap — around £8.5 million — but the company expects significant improvements in productivity because less paperwork will be duplicated. A major obstacle to improving an old building’s IQ lies in the incompatibility of most equipment. A mixture of different word-processing systems, digital telephone exchanges and so on leads to a spaghetti junction of wiring. The pressure for standardisation so that equipment can be interconnected is growing. The International Standards Organisation is promoting the Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) model of seven levels of communications.

OSI is gaining acceptance in the United Kingdom and Europe, although a notable outsider from the 16 members of the newly formed American Corporation for Open Systems is IBM, which has its own proprietary "systems network architecture.”

Meanwhile, one company pushing hard for a large slice of the integrated building market is Honeywell, which was in the control business long before it entered the computer fray. (Honeywell’s first centralised building control system went into the White House in 1953.)