F&S launches Remote Operations and Control Centre to help manage climate control in campus buildings

The ROCC is helping handle the 4,500 annual climate control requests, using proactive monitoring to enable faster fixes and fewer disruptions

In 2024, University of Toronto Facilities & Services (F&S) received more than 4,500 “comfort calls” reporting temperature, ventilation and humidity issues on the St. George campus. 

In a large network of interconnected classrooms, offices, research laboratories and athletic facilities, these calls are rarely as simple as adjusting your home thermostat.  

Each call typically requires on-site investigation from a building engineer to assess the issue before any corrective work can begin. With up to 50 comfort calls per day, addressing them all manually is a formidable task.  

Now, the F&S team has an extra layer of support. 

Launched in July 2025, the Remote Operations and Control Centre — better known as the ROCC — is enabling faster fixes and fewer disruptions. 

Instead of waiting for comfort issues to be reported, the ROCC continuously tracks comfort systems using thousands of monitoring points in 24 buildings on the St. George campus, about half of the campus’ building area.  

When ROCC analysts detect an anomaly, they investigate almost immediately, using live building data, recent trends and previous service requests to help identify the possible cause and either share this information with response teams or troubleshoot the issue remotely. 

“The ROCC is about using data to enhance how we work together to keep campus comfortable,” says Michelt Carvalho, senior manager, building automation and operations, who conceived the initiative. “ROCC analysts work closely with building engineers and our trades teams. In the control centre, we’re analyzing large volumes of data across multiple systems. When an issue can’t be fixed remotely, we feed this data to the response teams who use it to get to the root cause of the issue more quickly.” 

Instead of chasing problems after they’re reported, ROCC analysts can now detect issues as they form, address them before they escalate and enable building engineers to focus their expertise where it’s most needed. 

“One Thursday, the ROCC team flagged an abnormality in one of our building’s air handling units — an issue that was drawing in too much hot outdoor air across the building,” says Mechanical Operations & Maintenance Manager (North Area) John Walker. “Our building engineers and control technicians worked together on site to identify the cause and correct it. Without the ROCC alert and quick teamwork, the system would have been overloaded, making the building uncomfortably hot by the next day. It really shows the value of having ROCC monitoring our building automation systems and helping us quickly triage and resolve anomalies before they escalate.” 

By shifting from reactive service to proactive monitoring, many issues can be detected and fixed before they disrupt campus life. This monitoring also informs ongoing preventative maintenance work, helping the F&S team address issues before they cause bigger problems, ultimately enhancing occupant comfort across campus. 

This means that when calls do come in, there is more capacity to respond. 

Early results have been dramatic. In the first four buildings connected to the ROCC — Medical Sciences Building, Bahen Centre for Information Technology, Myhal Centre for Engineering Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Ontario Institute for Studies in Education — average response times improved by more than 90 per cent and every single call has had an investigation underway within 15 minutes. 

“The ROCC represents a fundamental shift in how we manage our spaces at U of T,” says Ron Saporta, chief operating officer, property services and sustainability. “As part of our strategic commitment to driving operational excellence, the ROCC allows us to act faster, smarter and with fewer disruptions for our community, all with no additional operating budget. And it’s all thanks to deep collaboration between our building engineers, Utilities and IT teams.” 

In the coming months, the ROCC will continue to expand to cover more than 50 buildings with the potential to add newly constructed buildings and any existing ones that are upgraded to include building automation systems. The system also lays the groundwork for U of T to integrate AI-enabled tools that support fault detection, diagnostics and action recommendations in future. Together, these changes are improving building performance, efficiency and comfort on the St. George campus. 

The ROCC is managed by Michelt Carvalho, senior manager, building automation and operations. For more information, please contact michelt.carvalho@utoronto.ca.