The motto of this year's Building Technologies display is "Creating Perfect Places". Today, people spend about 90 percent of their lives in buildings – not just their own residence, but also offices, production facilities, schools and universities as well as hospitals and retirement homes. Products and solutions from Siemens help make these buildings perfect places – safe and secure places with a comfortable climate.

At its booth, Building Technologies will also show how digitalisation in building technology is changing the entire lifecycle of buildings, from planning and construction to utilisation and management. Digitalisation is the key to efficient and intelligently networked buildings that are able to communicate. The impact of this development will be demonstrated in different thematic areas. 

The first area is networked products, cloud solutions and smart data. Thanks to digitalisation, buildings can communicate data such as energy consumption and pending maintenance. The flow of data begins with networked products. Sensors and actuators deliver a continuous stream of data and send it to the cloud. Analytics, and the expertise of Siemens, turn the "big data" that is being collected into "smart data." This makes it possible to identify user behaviour or consumption patterns and initiate corrective measures.

Innovative building and energy management is a second area of focus. Using a digital interface, the Desigo CC building and energy management platform consolidates data from different disciplines (HVAC, security, fire safety, etc.) in a single user interface. This makes it possible to manage, control and analyze the entire building from a central location so it can be operated economically, safely and in an energy-efficient manner.

And the final area of focus will be building information modelling (BIM): Building Technologies is one of the first vendors to supply a comprehensive range of HVAC products that include digital BIM data for use in the "digital twin." This digital model is used to design the building with all its disciplines and perform ongoing simulation, testing and error correction during the design phase. The benefits of this approach include optimised energy efficiency, higher cost savings and better sustainability. Siemens already has over 1,000 products from different areas (field devices, room automation, fire safety) that come with BIM data. More products are added on a continuous basis.