See how Willow can help you cut costs, save energy, and operate your buildings more efficiently and sustainably.
As August fades and September begins, the signs of fall start to show with cooler mornings and a shift in hue for the leaves on much of the trees. It’s a season of transition, and nowhere is that more evident than in schools and university campuses. Classroom schedules come alive again, and daily space utilization data reveals a familiar rhythm of bursts of activity followed by quiet stretches. These patterns often reflect a clear opportunity to optimize energy usage: dialing down during downtime while maintaining comfort during peak hours. Willow’s Active Control functionality turns quiet periods into powerful gains in sustainability.
To date, Willow’s Digital Twins have enabled remote monitoring by normalizing data and surfacing actionable insights. The evolution of this workflow is Active Control, a new capability that enables writing values back into systems. This means that the platform can change how equipment operates in real time. Classroom schedules are a good example of Active Control in action. When a classroom empties after a lecture, or a meeting room goes unused for the afternoon, it’s not uncommon for the HVAC to continue running at full load. It’s possible this continues well into long periods of inactivity in the classroom, including longer holidays around Thanksgiving and Christmas. Through these periods, the thermostat holds steady, and the building pays the price in wasted energy and inflated carbon emissions.
Active control changes things by directly connecting occupancy data from systems such as Cisco Spaces, Crestron, and class schedules from platforms like Accruent. With Willow, building systems can now respond instantly. Spaces with no occupancy are automatically set back into energy-saving mode, which lowers operating costs and reduces emissions. The power behind Active Control lies in the a rich ontology and Willow’s Knowledge Graph, which maps relationships between spaces, equipment, HVAC zones and telemetry points. When certain conditions are met, Active Control writes back to the building system, adjusting operating modes in real time.
Willow empowers operators with visibility on faults, inefficiencies, and usage trends. Up until now, addressing issues has relied on work order generation, sending out technicians and then reviewing if the problem was resolved. Active Control closes the loop by acting automatically while retaining a layer of supervision, essentially offering the best of both worlds. Operators set auto-approvals for routine, low-risk adjustments like resetting thermostats in unoccupied rooms. For higher-impact changes, they use manual checks or staged rollouts to monitor and confirm commands before applying them at scale. Fallback logic can protect in case certain commands do not achieve the desired outcome, hence maintaining system safety and reliability. This approach ensures that buildings stay responsive and adaptive, blending automation with accountability so the system automates optimizations with human oversight.
The opportunity for real-time automation with Active Control is immense. Demand controlled ventilation for HVAC systems, lighting and shading adjustments as people move through spaces or blinds lowering in response to sun exposure are just a few examples. Active Control marks a turning point in the journey toward truly smart, sustainable buildings as they evolve into systems that respond, adapt, and act in real time.