Smart Building Conceptualization: A Comparative Analysis of Literature and Standards

Smart building is an emerging concept in the contemporary built environment that aims to leverage new technologies and practices to improve building's performance. Despite recent efforts to articulate the concept, there is still no commonly accepted definition for the term smart or intelligent building. Also, there are discrepancies in smart buildings' components and evaluation criteria identified by academic literature and industry publications. This paper analyzes the concept of smart building in order to determine its context and applications. For this purpose, in this paper, we completed a comprehensive literature review of both academic articles and building certification standards to summarize the current interpretations and characteristics of smart buildings. Subsequently, we conducted a comparative ontological analysis on the selected publications and the relevant building certification standards to further identify smart building's components in comparison with other relevant concepts including sustainable building. The results of this study will benefit future research in smart buildings as well as the development of certification standards for smart buildings' evaluation.