BIM

Schedule & Commissioning and the Future of LEED

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NREL has recently released a report recommending tagging standards for building systems. This tagging standard is part of a larger recommendation on proper commissioning standards. The same report (http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy11osti/50073.pdf) posits that a properly commissioned building system interface be able to offer up a light-weight building model, linked to these standard tags. This creates standard semantics for the building system as a minimum commissioning requirement for a future version of LEED.

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BSI Part 3: The Metadata Problem

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Metadata refers to information about data. While control systems for buildings can offer up an impressive amount of data, it takes far too much effort to figure out what it means. In a medium-sized commercial building, tens of thousands of points can take a month to unravel before useful integration with the businesses and lives of the people who occupy those buildings is possible. Throughout all the integrator must...

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BSI Part 1: What is the Building System Interface?

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After the ASHRAE meetings, and during the AHR conference, several of us are getting together to discuss building system metadata. The goal is to define interfaces to support quick fast integrations of building systems into the wider world. This is the first of several posts describing this interface. Drop me a line or watch for announcements from LONmark if you want to join us for discussion.

In my smart grid work, I began describing each end node as a microgrid. A microgrid is a self-contained entity responsible for managing its own energy use, generation, storage, conversion, and as a last resort, market operations. This model eliminates...

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BSI and a blast from the past

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Every now and then I run across an old email that I have long forgotten, but speaks to my current activities. I think that this comment, written long ago in the oBIX forum speaks to something I need to return to. Jon recently gave me and WS-Calendar and EMIX some excellent advice on on creating standards for re-use and extension.

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Considine, Toby (Facilities Technology Office)
Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 6:36 AM
To: 'jon.bosak@sun.com'
Cc: 'Grobler, Francois ERDC-CERL-IL'
Subject: RE: oBIX Guiding Principles

 

There are parts of Control Systems that are very business oriented. If an embedded control system detects that it needs maintenance, and can submit a maintenance request to an identified partner, clearly that work order looks like a normal business transaction.

Meeting and occupancy schedules might look like UBL (room will be occupied tomorrow from 2-4; use oBIX to inform HVAC, Access Control, Intrusion Detection, A/V management control systems. Read the Electric Meter before and after the meeting). Does the UBL standard extend the ICAL standard, or subsume it or...? Clearly, there is a benefit for scheduling functions to re-use commonly implemented scheduling requests.

These functions are in the future. What oBIX has to start with doing is exposing the event driven world of controls to the enterprise. For the most part, this starts with state. What are all the room temperatures on the 3rd and 4th floors? For how many hours did the compressors run today?Which areas of the building are currently secured? Some of this information is creeping into QOS agreements in real estate, and so intersects with the work of OSCRE (Open Systems for Commercial Real Estate). To my knowledge, UBL does not really include the nomenclatures for this because this is outside of the normal business functions. Am I wrong? Can you refer me to any relevant portions of UBL?

I think an early use for oBIX will be to provide a platform on which GRIDWISE (www.gridwise.org) type applications are built. That may be the first place where standard UBL functions hit, as price incentives are offered to buildings on the spot market to forefend brown-outs and the like. That feels more like bid/delivery/request rebate.

The construction industry has long had a separate open standard for construction documents, known as the IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) developed by the International Association for Interoperability (http://www.iai-international.org/iai_international/) and already required in many international construction projects. The IFC space includes construction documents, spatial data, spatial modeling, etc. The EU, in particular, leans heavily on this ISO specification, particularly in the Nordic countries. The largest landlord in the world, the GSA, has mandated that all transmittals for the design, construction, and acceptance of buildings. The closely related GBXML (Green Building XML) is a lightweight variant of IFCXML focused more on performance issues. GB Modeling, using GBXML for transferring building performance data, is required for those projects that wish to be designated as compliant with programs using words such as "sustainable" and "LEEDS". We have long considered that IFCML and the closely related GBXML were our most important shared spaces. Is there a defined interface/mapping between IFCXML and UBL?

Thanks for your comments

 

tc

 

-----Original Message-----
From: jon.bosak@sun.com
Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 9:20 PM
To: Considine, Toby (Facilities Technology Office)
Subject: Re: oBIX Guiding Principles

| G) If, as seem likely, this document is adopted as an OASIS standard,
| I recommend that we steal freely from this document, reusing as much
| as we can in our rules for developing subsidiary oBIX services as well
| as in the core document. It is well written and defends its decison
| in a language that is focused and apropriate for the enterprise
| developer.

Since UBL is probably going to become the dominant standard for international trade documents, why don't you just adopt the UBL schemas and have done with it? After all, UBL is based on a pretty widely adopted specification (xCBL 3.0) that was developed specifically for electronic marketplaces. If there are any data elements missing from UBL 1.0 that are needed for oBIX, we can probably include them in UBL 1.1.

 

Jon