Like many universities, Georgia Tech has a lot of data, but decision-makers do not always know how to best interpret the vast amounts of data or how to use it to help set campus priorities, especially when it comes to making investments in the campus infrastructure.

This past October, Anne Rogers, program manager for the Office of Campus Sustainability, and Scott Duncan, a research engineer in the Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory, presented at the Association for Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) conference on developing a “Smart Campus,” using Georgia Tech’s campus as a living­-learning laboratory.

Smart Campus is a modeling program consisting of 20,000 data points from utility meters across campus that help stakeholders understand how campus infrastructure systems are operating in real time. In addition, Smart Campus offers outputs of predictive tools and savings – key metrics used by operation personnel in Facilities Management.

This collaborative campus effort is designed to help answer system-level sustainability questions across campus operations, interpret the data, and develop visualization tools to develop and prioritize a sustainable agenda.