Intelligent buildings

The engineering of complex systems is a mature discipline in aerospace and defence. Drawing on those domains, the UK Royal Academy of Engineering developed a set of principles to guide engineering education and to influence the procurement and management of major projects. The principles, and the approach to design that underpins them, operate well in other domains. Intelligent buildings require similar whole-life thinking and trade-offs to find optimal solutions to the complex problems that have to be solved to deliver the benefits of ‘intelligence’. The RAEng's six principles apply to the design, construction, use and eventual disposal of intelligent buildings just as they do to a weapon or spacecraft.