Together, Skanska and PRODYNA have created an innovative portal to simplify and improve the operation of buildings on a large scale. Optimise the building's energy efficiency, reduce its carbon footprint, reduce the time spent on facility management and improve the quality of life for its occupants.

Customer

Skanska is a leading multinational construction and development company, known for its expertise in building and infrastructure projects. With a strong presence in both the commercial and residential sectors, Skanska focuses on delivering sustainable and innovative solutions.

Challenge

In the face of pressing global challenges, the built environment is at a critical crossroads.

With buildings responsible for a staggering 40% of global carbon emissions and typically performing 200% below their design specifications, the construction and real estate industry urgently needed innovative solutions to address their environmental impact.

Skanska, a global leader in construction and property development, recognized that traditional approaches to building management were not delivering sustainable, efficient operations. Building systems were operating in isolation, with no integration between critical components such as HVAC, lighting and mechanical systems. Maintenance was carried out according to rigid schedules rather than based on actual conditions, resulting in wasted resources and premature equipment failure. Meanwhile, building occupants experienced an environment that compromised their productivity and well-being, with problems such as poor air quality going undetected and unresolved.

The challenge was clear: How could Skanska use technology to create intelligent buildings that significantly reduce carbon emissions, optimise operational efficiency and improve occupant productivity - all while delivering a measurable return on investment for building owners?

Solution

This pressing need led to the development of Intellekt, an innovative smart building platform. Built on PRODYNA's AWS cloud infrastructure, Intellekt creates a bi-directional connection between previously siloed building systems, enabling real-time monitoring, data-driven insights and automated control.

Intellekt represents a paradigm shift in the way buildings are managed and operated, proving that with the right technology, buildings can finally perform as designed – or even better – while dramatically reducing their environmental impact and creating healthier, more productive spaces for occupants.

At the heart of PRODYNA's innovative portal was a robust IoT infrastructure that could scale with their growing operations, while maintaining cost efficiency. PRODYNA and Skanska delivered a comprehensive solution that harnessed the power of AWS serverless services, creating a foundation for their ecosystem of connected devices.

The architecture we designed took a strategic multi-database approach, carefully selecting specialized storage solutions for optimal performance. Amazon Aurora provided the reliable backbone for all backend operations, while Amazon Timestream was implemented specifically for time-series IoT data, enabling powerful analytics and real-time insights. For maximum accessibility and performance, all frontend static assets were hosted on Amazon S3.

For scalability and resilience, our team chose AWS's managed Kubernetes service (EKS) to handle the containerised frontend and backend workloads. Another reason for choosing Kubernetes for the core services of the Intellekt platform was the ability to easily deploy the application in new environments. For example, a high-security version of the application is planned to run as a single-tenant instance in the customer's data centre (e.g. in an AWS outpost).

Cloud-native IoT architecture

Our solution leverages Infrastructure as Code principles, with the entire cloud environment defined and deployed through Terraform and Terragrunt via Github. This approach enables automated infrastructure provisioning via CI/CD pipelines across a multi-account AWS Landing Zone architecture, ensuring consistency and reducing deployment risks.

At the heart of our IoT data pipeline, AWS IoT Core provides secure device connectivity through mutual TLS encryption, while performing essential data transformation functions. This pre-processed data flows seamlessly into Amazon Timestream, which is optimised for storing and analysing time-series IoT data.

User access is fortified by AWS WAF protection at the CloudFront edge, creating a secure content delivery network with global reach and minimal latency. The application itself runs on Amazon EKS, providing a resilient Kubernetes environment for our sophisticated three-tier application architecture.

The backend services aggregate and process data from both the Timestream and Aurora databases, providing comprehensive insight into both real-time IoT telemetry and relational business data. Keycloak handles authentication and authorization, while the development stack combines Spring Boot for the backend services with ReactJS for the responsive frontend interface.

This architecture delivers enterprise-grade security, automated scalability, and high performance while maintaining operational efficiency and cost effectiveness - the hallmarks of a truly successful cloud-native IoT implementation.

Intellekt at a glance

Benefits

• Reduce power consumption & carbon emissions
• Enable remote facility management to save costs
• Perform predictive maintenance to prevent failures
• Improve air quality for occupants

Results

With Intellekt, Skanska sees significant improvements in the performance of the buildings where the platform is deployed.

This is an example for one building in London:

• 35% energy reduction
• 29T CO² reduction
• 10%+ improvement in building management efficiency
• 1.2K trees saved

Conclusion 

Together, PRODYNA and Skanska have created an innovative platform that enables building managers to efficiently monitor and manage building usage remotely, resulting in significant process improvements, reduced energy consumption and carbon emissions, streamlined facility management and predictive maintenance based on actual component usage.

Business Transformation

• Enhanced efficiency: The intelligent portal has optimised energy consumption and reduced operating costs.
• Improved facility management: Remote management capabilities have made facility services more efficient and less time consuming.
• Predictive maintenance: Digital twin technology enables proactive maintenance decisions, reducing downtime and repair costs.

Positioning for Future Growth

• Sustainability: The solution supports Skanska's commitment to sustainability by minimising its carbon footprint.
• Scalability: The platform's capabilities can be scaled to other projects, positioning Skanska for continued growth and innovation in the construction industry.
• Customer satisfaction: Skanska has expressed high satisfaction with the project, noting the long-term value that the solution continues to provide. The improvements in energy efficiency, operational processes and maintenance have not only improved the current operations, but have also provided a strong foundation for future developments.