The building technology of a large property produces vast amounts of data. Thousands of sensors continuously measure the building’s operations, air quality, energy consumption, and safety. The systems generate information that can be used to control, optimize, and maintain the building’s functions efficiently. There is a great deal of data, but how can it be used to improve and develop predictive property maintenance and performance, usability, and ensure that the property retains its value?
Luotea’s team decided to approach the challenge boldly by organizing a hackathon event. A hackathon is a fast-paced developer event, often lasting a few days, where multidisciplinary teams create new solutions to real-world challenges. In the construction and real estate sector, common themes include the use of data, energy efficiency, and smart property maintenance. The aim of Luotea’s hackathon launch was to delve deeper into predictive property maintenance and the development of smarter buildings.
At Luotea’s hackathon, participants worked with real operational and building-related data to develop solutions for areas such as predictive maintenance, optimizing building conditions, or improving indoor conditions and space utilization. In the spirit of the event, the challenge was open-ended: not all information was available at the outset, and teams were expected to explore, question, and design their own approaches. The end result could be an idea, an operating model, or even a ready-to-deploy service.
At the end of the event, the teams presented their ideas to Luotea’s jury. The best entries were also awarded cash prizes. The winner of this hackathon was Auttaa.ai with a solution of how customization of property services can practically be implemented using data-analytic methods.
The event, held at Maria 01 in Helsinki with the help of KiraHub, attracted considerable interest. A total of 13 teams were formed and eagerly took on the challenge. It was the first hackathon in Luotea’s history, and such events have not been very common in the real estate or construction sector in recent years. According to Luotea’s development manager Matias Riihiaho, networking and making new contacts were also important aspects.
"Participants were grouped into teams very well. They represented an excellent range of areas of expertise, including map analytics, data analytics and software development. Cross-disciplinary teams bring new ideas and helps people look at the topic from different perspectives", says Matias Riihiaho.
Riihiaho himself spent most of the weekend mentoring on the hackathon challenges, advising and challenging the teams.
"The result was agile application and use of data. The experiment strengthened the idea that with the right tools and courage, results can be achieved by rapid experimentation and iteration. We gained ideas that we can implement immediately. For example, new ways of presenting data, mining data for insights, new KPI’s and the clever use and approaches to using technologies that we previously haven’t used", Riihiaho summarizes the weekend’s takeaways.
The real estate sector generates a great deal of data. When information has not yet been utilized, structured, modeled or development purposes, experts refer to it as “messy.” Data needs to be structured in new ways and models that benefit customers. New models can deliver operational efficiency, improve energy efficiency, or enhance areas such as occupational safety or the visualization of data for decision-making. An intensive hackathon offers many opportunities for this.
Blagoy Manevski works as a research engineer at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences. Luotea’s hackathon was the first hackathon in his own field that he had participated in. According to him, the best part was having access to real and relevant data.
"My background is in architecture and construction informatics. I currently work with the use of construction data, so the hackathon was a good opportunity to test some ideas", Manevski says.
As a professional in construction information management, Manevski is interested in the use of data in the construction sector, and Luotea’s event offered an excellent opportunity for this.
"I believe that in the future, not only property management but all stakeholders will be able to make use of linked building data. The hackathon taught me a lot about using data in the sector", Manevski describes.
Sustainability, energy use, and the optimization of facilities and resources are strongly reflected in Luotea’s customers’ operations. Energy efficiency and resource optimization were also of interest to the participants of the hackathon.
"In my opinion, predictive maintenance allows us to optimize resources and be more sustainable. For example, when to replace smoke detectors, when and where to clean, or how and where to purify the air. These are just some examples, but in practice, product and asset lifespans can be extended as much as possible, avoidable damage can be reduced, and energy use can be optimized", says data scientist Núria Canals, who participated in the hackathon.
Canals works in Helsinki at a start-up that uses computer vision to analyze basketball players’ body mechanics. Núria Canals participated in the hackathon by chance, with the encouragement of a friend. She was not previously familiar with Luotea, but the themes addressed were of interest to her.
"I really like what Luotea is doing. I learned how companies manage their data and how it can be improved so that predictive models work better. I learned about some of their projects, which made me want to learn more about them and think about solutions that could be implemented", Canals says.