A collaborative forum gathering various stakeholders to explore key topics in the field of smart buildings and publish actionable insights to help tackle challenges in this industry.
Over the years, buildings have become increasingly automated, evolving into “smart buildings” designed to improve indoor comfort, energy efficiency, and sustainability. These buildings are expected to be data-driven, continuously learning, predicting, and adapting to internal and external conditions. They should optimize operations, enhance automated systems, interact with occupants and energy grids, detect faults, leverage digital twins, and manage data using semantic principles. Despite growing interest, questions remain about what truly defines a smart building, how to assess its intelligence and performance, and whether it delivers real benefits and sustainability.
The Nordic Smart Building Initiative (NSBI) aims to create and coordinate a collaborative forum to discuss matters related to smart buildings in the Nordic countries. Dedicated task forces and working sub-groups conduct collaborative investigations into specific questions related to smart buildings, aiming to provide actionable insights to both the research community and the building industry. The NSBI will produce and disseminate new knowledge, reviews, and best practices. It will also conduct transversal comparisons across different countries and facilitate interesting discussions through webinars, workshops, technical reports, peer-reviewed scientific articles, and magazine articles.
The NSBI gathers researchers, academics, engineers, consultants, practitioners, and other stakeholders in the smart building industry in the Nordic countries, including Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The working groups and discussions are also open to participants from other countries; however, discussions and work will primarily focus on issues relevant to the Nordic context.
The current working sub-groups of the NSBI are working on the following topics:
- Mapping smart buildings in the Nordics
- What is a smart building in the Nordic context?
- Tools for smart building design and assessment
- AI and smart controllers for smart buildings
- Digital twins and smart buildings
- Barriers and drivers to the adoption of smart buildings
- Building management/automation systems in smart buildings
- Smart building life cycle and resilience to the future world
- Ontologies and semantic principles for smart buildings
- Teaching and training about smart buildings
The NSBI currently has 40 active participants from 27 institutions and companies across 13 countries. The NSBI is led by SINTEF Community (Project leader: Hicham Johra), with endorsements from IBPSA World and IBPSA-Nordic (the International Building Performance Simulation Association in the Nordic countries).
One can find an 8-minute video presentation of the Nordic Smart Building Initiative here: https://youtu.be/lcf45_EB9uM?si=Fg24fbc0F4P8xA8P
Contact person:
Hicham Johra, Research Scientist, SINTEF Community, Norway: (+47) 403 27 404, hicham.johra@sintef.no
News and publications:
2025
- Kickstart of the Nordic Smart Building Initiative (2025). H. Johra, P. de Wilde, B. Petrovic, M.H. de Badyn, T. Psomas. SINTEF. News. https://blog.sintef.com/building/kickstart-of-the-nordic-smart-building-initiative/
- Preliminary discussions from the Nordic Smart Building Initiative on the definition of Smart Buildings (2025). H. Johra. SINTEF Academic Press. Publication. https://dx.doi.org/11250/3213623