By Caitriona Foley
As a technology and engineering conglomerate, Siemens AG seeks innovative, automated solutions to optimize the sustainability of physical spaces. A valued partner of the Fung Institute’s Master of Engineering program, this past year, Siemens sponsored a team of five MEng students in their capstone project. The team consisted of five Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Master’s students: Jing Cao, Shanaya Malik, Winfred Wang, Chen Zhang, and Kelvin Zhao, with concentrations in Computer Systems, Signal Processing & Communications, Computer Graphics, Data Science, and Computer Systems, respectively.
Ordinarily, students would be given a detailed problem summary to preview ahead of joining a team. In their summary, Siemens deliberately presented a project without a clearly defined challenge, instead interested in the perspectives the MEng students would bring. “Students today will be the CEOs, CFOs, and decision‑makers of tomorrow,” shares Siemens group advisor and strategist Inga Becker.
“For us, they’re a glimpse into the future, [and] we wanted to learn how they approach the problem space and see if they surface challenges we might miss.”
Through their collaboration, the team identified the use case and scope of the project. “It was actually the students who identified the core challenge,” Becker notes. The aim was to develop a prototype, using Siemens data and real‑world constraints, that could track and reduce carbon emissions in buildings and be embedded into Siemens’ trademark digital building platform, Building X.
The platform integrates the digital and physical worlds, facilitating communication between operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT). OT connects, monitors, and secures an organization’s industrial operations, such as an electric power grid or an HVAC system. Conversely, IT encompasses the computers, networks, and software that maintain and store a company’s digital information, such as cloud data.
Building X bridges the world of information with that of physical machinery, blending IT and OT data to optimize a variety of building operations. The platform supports construction in a range of industries, from educational facilities to data centers, and manages essential building procedures. Through Building X, Siemens aims to create more sustainable and efficient buildings for its clients, offering a number of applications designed to optimize building management, including emissions tracking, energy budgeting, and cloud storage. It is an ever-evolving platform, and as such, Siemens tasked the students with the open-ended project of identifying and creating an improvement to Building X’s capabilities through an Application Programming Interface (API).
An API serves as a middleman between two pieces of software, allowing developers to selectively exchange data and functionality between them. They are a cornerstone of Siemens’ strategy, allowing them to constantly innovate and build on existing products. For example, an API may extract data from a satellite and transmit it to a building’s database to inform its operations schedule; which is exactly what the Capstone group did. By the completion of their time in the MEng program, they successfully built an API for Building X to minimize the carbon intensity of buildings.
Carbon intensity refers to how many grams of carbon dioxide are produced alongside a standard unit of energy. Energy from fossil fuels has a high carbon intensity, while renewable energy has almost none. As energy demands peak, so does the supply of non-renewable energy, and with it the carbon intensity of the electric grid. Any individual can minimize their carbon footprint by choosing to use energy when demand on the power grid is low. For example, charging your electric vehicle overnight as opposed to 9 am on a working day. By scheduling building operations to run when energy demands are low and subsequently the quantity of renewable energy available is greater, the students developed a product that will reduce the carbon intensity of buildings supported by Building X.
To inform their product, the group was given access to Siemens’ test buildings, operational data, and preexisting APIs — a mound of data to assess and transform in order to code their application. Despite the challenges associated with access to such a large network and a project constrained to just nine months, the team walked away with a working product. They point to their weekly meetings with the Siemens team as an especially valuable resource in narrowing their research and surmounting roadblocks.
Likewise, their advisor regards the perspective the students brought as central to the initiative. “Working with students added another layer of diversity — especially across generations. They challenged assumptions, brought fresh thinking, and helped us see the problem through a future lens, while still delivering a tangible, realistic outcome. That combination is very hard to replicate otherwise,” Becker shares.
The opportunity to work with a real industry partner offered the group invaluable experience, particularly to “apply academic and theoretical concepts to office level work,” and to implement, test, and present their product to stakeholders. Siemens remarked that the partnership allowed the company to “stay connected to future talent and future thinking.”
The students exposed Siemens to “new ways of digesting and using data” and “their work confirmed challenges and experiences” seen throughout the organization.
A clearly cherished partnership, the collaboration of this cohort of MEng students and Siemens encompasses the inventive and collective environment at the Fung Institute, as well as the diversity of perspective and ability that drives innovation.
Interested in learning more about the MEng Partnership Program that helped bring this project to life?