Established in 1988, the Advanced Building Systems Integration Consortium (ABSIC) is a university-industry-government partnership to pursue research, demonstration, and development towards improving the quality and performance of commercial buildings and building systems.
ABSIC conducts research, development and demonstrations for the purpose of increasing the satisfaction, health, well-being and productivity of occupants, of enabling organizational change, and technological adaptability while improving cost, energy and environmental effectiveness. ABSIC has been created for the advancement of the North American building industry in pursuing the technologies and the settings needed for high-performance work environments.
Mission
The mission of ABSIC is to create a collaborative organization to enable industry, government and academe to conduct multi-disciplinary research, development and demonstration regarding all aspects of high performance buildings, from organization, to information technology, to people and to energyy and environment. ABSIC creates fundamental knowledge in this area to enable the education of undergraduates, graduates and professionals and subsequent transfer to all segments of the industry.
Goals and Objectives
Over twenty building industries and six government agencies have joined with the Center of Building Performance and Diagnostics at Carnegie Mellon University to advance our goals:
- To identify international developments in new office design, organizational approaches, and developments in integrated components and systems. Accomplished through in- depth field studies with a trans-disciplinary team, summarized in executive summaries.
- To generate concepts for new products and new integrated assemblies towards the long term performance of advanced buildings. Accomplished through collective efforts of consortium members and CBPD for concept development, and collective research, development and marketing as appropriate.
- To improve the process for delivery of high performance Offices of the Future by including building performance quality assurance processes and seeking opportunities to integrate improved processes in on-going projects in the U.S. and abroad.
- To develop a highly innovative laboratory with advanced products and advanced product integrations (systems) for educational and research purposes - the Intelligent Workplace of the Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics (with performance monitoring and feedback).
- To encourage state of the art demonstration projects with innovative products and product integrations to study the industry's potential penetration into the building delivery process (with performance monitoring and feedback).
- To improve graduate and undergraduate educational programs and texts on Systems Integration for Building Performance for professional education programs. To direct MS research & PhD theses that significantly increase the professional knowledge base.
- To increase communication and publications on advances in building performance and innovations in product and systems integration for performance.
- To develop the Intelligent Workplace Retrofit - re- engineering and re-freshing building shell, core, service and furnishings to support organizational and technological change with high occupant and management benefit.