India will need to construct 700-900 million square metres of urban space every year till 2030. Moreover, the energy use aspect of the buildings needs attention for creating long-lasting, environmentally friendly structures and infrastructure. The same logic applies to commercial buildings as well.  

One such initiative caught our attention - Bangalore-based startup Bert Labs deployed AI and IoT to help Unilever India, the consumer goods giant in India, attain energy efficiency.  

Bert Labs Technology Platform brought an average of 52% energy savings and a 52% reduction in carbon footprint across all the blocks at Unilever House (HO of HUL) when compared with the previous week's operation in similar weather conditions. 

"The number one energy guzzler in any commercial building is the HVAC system anywhere in the world. Therefore, the company started to explore partnerships with companies that own real estate for their office complexes, R&D facilities, and manufacturing facilities. Unilever and FMCG became the obvious choice being the leading companies and sectors with high energy consumption," said Rohit Kochar, Founder, Executive Chairman & CEO of Bert Labs. 

Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) is the use of several technologies to control the humidity, temperature, and purity of the air in an enclosed space. 

Tech-stack to rescue  

At Unilever House, controls were done in silos and not real-time. However, Bert Platform Solutions is conceptualised and built well, synergised with the solution to be executed at the site for higher savings in energy consumption. Bert Platform Solution, as executed at the site, is a suite of 1000+ proprietary Bert Maximus IoT devices. 

• Bert MinnieComm captures the operational health parameters of Variable Air Volumes (VAVs), chillers, pumps, cooling towers, and air handling units (AHUs).   
• Bert Titan is commissioned to be an edge computing device to aggregate data from all the leaf nodes in the network.  
• Bert Minion captures power-related data of all chillers, pumps, cooling towers, and air handling units (AHUs).  
• Bert Milo captures thermal (Temperature and RH) and air quality parameters from the ambience in all the blocks, zones, and floors of this 1MSqFt, commercial complex.  
• Bert Branch acts as a relay device between the network's leaf node and base station.   
• Bert Qrious's proprietary IoT-powered Wireless sensor network has been commissioned on the whole campus for real-time data transmission and storage.  
• Bert Nova, a proprietary distributed computing platform, is hosted on Bert Titan and Unilever Azure Cloud for real-time automated data storage, data processing, data analytics, real-time learning and computation of data. Bert Nova dashboard is provided to Unilever stakeholders for real-time monitoring and basic operational controls to be executed when required.   

Lastly, Bert Optimus, a proprietary AI platform, is a deep Reinforcement Learning model which has Digital Twins and Reinforcement Learning software agents built into it. Bert Optimus, DRL model real-time control commands as determined are sent back to Bert MinnieComm for them to actuate controls, forming a 360 degrees fully automated, integrated control feedback loop.   

Challenges at hand 

The execution of the project was not easy, and the team faced multiple obstacles. The very first problem relates to researching and developing Bert Platform Solution for the site. IoT devices as part of Bert Maximus and IoT powered wireless sensor network, Bert Qrious was for the first time being commissioned in a commercial setting. And therefore, the teething challenges were overcome with meticulous planning and execution of the devices going through industrial testing and certification. 

Similarly, when it comes to installing and commissioning Bert Platform Solution at the site involves collaborating and dealing with multiple stakeholders, including OEMs, system integrators, and manufacturers. Hence, the company adopted a collaborative approach to deal with the same. Lastly, as the Bert Optimus system is a highly comprehensive end-to-end solution incorporating hardware and software complexities, having a pool of people with the right skill sets sometimes becomes a roadblock.  

The path ahead 

Government officials and corporate boards will be under increased pressure to demonstrate in 2022 that they are capable of monitoring and comprehending ESG issues, including climate change, according to S&P Global. So, whether it is Unilever or any foreign or Indian MNC, their top management strategic mandate has become to achieve their sustainability, ESG, and business transformation goals. They are focussed on transforming their building on sustainability, and people productivity has become essential for the business.  

"Companies are very eager to adopt sustainability as one of their core strategic goals as in the developed markets the respected governments have mandated this and in the developing markets government mandate on sustainability is 'the thing' in the foreseeable future," said Rohit. "Companies have become good corporate citizens and therefore are eager to contribute towards clean climate and become zero carbon and carbon neutral," he concluded.