The intelligent building definition: a central-european approach

As a result of the continuously emerging trend in human standards of life, in the last two decades the intelligent buildings (IBs) development becomes one of the most important research topic of the engineering community. Conscious of that traditional buildings are no longer capable to cope with the impact generated by the last generation information and microelectronic technologies, nowadays all the residential or commercial buildings trends to be designed towards the goal if “intelligent building”. Obviously, this achievement has generated a myriad of IBs definition and interpretations in the scientific community. It is no doubt that different cultures, regions of the world, or even some countries can emphasize different aspects when they use the IB concept. From a Central-European inhabitant´s point of view it is not difficult to observe that the actually existing IB development approaches contains some elements or put emphasis on aspects that do not covers in all the sociological behaviours and lifestyle of peoples from this region and significantly differs or from their socio-cultural habits. Without the claim to formalizing a universal definition of IBs, this paper introduces an original IB development model founded in four main concepts or pylons: inhabitant, information, energy, and adaptation. Basically, this specific IB approach has been conceived for the Central-European region, with its particular geographical, climate, and sociological behaviors and facilities. The implementation strategy of the model is carefully unfolded in the paper, by outlining its specificities. It is expected that the proposed IB definition approach can serve as support for future IB development researches, becoming a feasible solution in design and implementation efforts.