Once upon a time, a building was just a building, providing shelter from the elements and a space to meet its specific objectives. Most buildings needed light and ventilation, heating or cooling, and often some form of access control. These needs created opportunities for service providers to offer better and more efficient systems to suit their client’s unique demands, so automation was born, but few would have predicted how it would grow into the highly intelligent operations we see today. Automation was what is sounds like; a process in which the building began to do things without direct instruction. When it was too dark, lights would turn on. When it was too hot, cooling would kick in. It wasn’t intelligent but it was automatic, reducing the need for humans to monitor and react to environmental changes within a building. Automation was the beginning of a process that started removing the need for hands-on human involvement; […]