It’s the Little Things

I experienced one of those close encounters with American health care today.

The day started off simply enough. I woke up. A little sore from yesterday’s workout. Rusty (the dog) was eager for me to walk to the store. I have long refused to get the paper delivered because the walk to the store (with Rusty) to get the paper prevents me from falling into absolute sloth.

Medicine is usually far from my mind, because I don’t like it. My feelings are summed up in musing about the peculiar phrase “third party”. I know one party in every sale is the “buyer”, the one who provides funds. This is, in most of the world, the insurance company or the government. I know the other party in a market is the “seller.” This is the name assigned the person who provides goods. In most markets the third party is someone who does not enjoy the benefit of the sale. At the butcher, the third party is (or was) a cow. In medicine, not being the primary buyer or seller, I suspect the third party is me.

But this morning I walked half way down the driveway, and then retreated to my room. I was introduced to the wonderful first person experience “Kidney Stone”. Ouch. I have always respected the pain of people describing kidney stones – now my respect is greater. In the realm of such things, I got of easy. I was done writhing before they began treatment at the local hospital. They provided me with a morphine drip to keep me occupied until they could produce a bill. I know several restaurants that could benefit from this approach to better manage customer reactions to the end-of-meal vanishing waiter.

But that’s not what I admired about this interaction.

In a process new (to me), my wrist-band name-tag included a raised-print name. Every test tube, every vial, was impressed with this simple tag before it left my bed. A simple process. A low-tech process. But a process that improved accuracy while reducing time. I liked it.

Two weeks ago, at Bechtel in Frederick, Md, I opined on what we could do with intelligent buildings. I was challenged; a professor of mechanical engineering came to my defense. “We know how to do all that. We’ve known for 20 years” he said. And he was right. More than doing new things, we need to bring the stuff we have already known how to do to the table. New technologies, and new system visibility, will help us to do so.

What the Owner should know about NBIMS during Building Design and Construction

In a previous post, (Building Information Modeling),I described Building Modeling, the Building Information Model, and the difference between them. Here I will to describe how I see the use of BIM changing the process of acquiring a new facility.

The National BIM Standard (NBIMS) is based on the internationally accepted IFC data standards. The IFC standards include early capture of site information, of design and program goals, of regulatory requirements, and of contract information. The NBIMS process, by capturing this information at each stage of the process, is able to verify whether these needs are met as the project progresses through design and construction.

Where CAD automated the Drafting process, Building Modeling fundamentally changes the design process. Drawings become mere views of the model. Designers can try out the models before the building is built, allowing iterations of design in which function is tested, in the same way that boat and aircraft designs have been tested in advance of construction.

There is an odd market dynamic going on right now. The best designers use a BIM that they do not share. The best Contractors develop their own BIM to produce their bid and to guide their construction process; they do not share this lest it increase their liability. The owner receives no BIM at all. Somehow, we can afford to throw out two BIMs but we cannot afford to share one. The forward thinking owner will reduce costs and receive higher quality by contracting for the maintenance and sharing of a single BIM through design and construction.

Emerging best practices, with names like Green Design, or Sustainable Design, or LEEDS, develop an energy model as part of the design process. The energy model looks at the design decisions and computes how much energy the building will use when operating. The energy model can then be compared to the design intents, and changes made to improve the design.

Energy Modeling should be an intrinsic part of design that extends throughout the life of a building. Too many of today’s energy models are merely grafted onto the design process without intrinsic link to the design. New modeling tools are now able to read the BIM directly to produce energy models. This turns Energy Modeling into a means to “commission” the design prior to construction. It also means that the effects of value engineering on cost of operations can be re-computed easily.

Even the best of traditional CAD-based design leaves many problems undiscovered. Building systems are designed by different teams and rendered on different flat pieces of paper. If, say, the ductwork and the electrical conduit run through the same space, it may only be discovered during construction, when it is more expensive. Delays and expensive change orders are the natural result.

Experienced contractors understand these deficiencies in traditional design. They add some margin into their bids to cover errors and oversights, and to allow for the inevitable inaccuracies and missing components. Early experience suggests that if a building is defined using BIM, and if the BIM is shared with the contractors during the bid process, that the bids will come in lower than if traditional blueprints only are shared. The ensuing reduction in change orders, and the resulting on-time delivery, are additional financial benefits.

Building Information Modeling (BM, BIM, and NBIMS)

Building Information Modeling (BIM) has been described by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) as "the most significant transformational event in our business for the past 500 years". Today, it also means different things to different people. The National BIM Standards (NBIMS) is an effort to change the entire facility design, construction, and acquisition process to catch up to best practices in other engineering and financial disciplines.

There is an unfortunate confusion in terminology I must address early on. Building Modeling refers to mathematical models of a building, including its materials, so it can be analyzed prior to construction. Using a building model, blueprints and construction documents are mere projections or reports of the underlying model. The Building Information Model comprises all of the information involved in the design, construction, and operation of a building, beginning with the earliest design intents. The Building Model is just one portion of the BIM, and the NBIMS specifies that the building model follow certain standards.

A recent article published by American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), suggested that using BIM offered the following benefits:

Design:

• 20% to 50% reduction in Design Cycle Time
• 100% Accurate Procurement package

Construction:

• Time and Cost reductions 20% to 40%
• Reduced Rework

Operation:

• Life-Cycle O&M reduction 10%-40%
• Reduced Handover/Turnover time

Even these numbers represent only a part of the benefits. Last year, the International Codes Council (ICC) demonstrated automated code compliance checking of a BIM; their goal is same-day code compliance review. The latest Energy Modeling software is able to reads the BIM directly, enabling iterative modeling as the design changes. Many of the current engineering, environmental, and design initiatives start with the use of BIM as a requisite for participants. BIM is seen a key enabler for future energy systems, from the Galvin Electricity Initiative to the GridWise Architectural initiatives, to the Zero Energy Commercial Building.

The goal of NBIMS is a common framework and format for sharing BIMs across vendors and organizations. Most CAD vendors, including AutoDesk, Bentley, and ArchiCAD read and write BIM datasets. Increasingly these BIM datasets are NBIMS compliant. Using NBIMS, data developed during initial programming is transmitted with design and operation data, and all information continues to add value throughout the facility life-cycle.

BIM is so large, and so important, that it is hard to understand. Instead, like the blind men and the elephant, we can stumble toward it from a variety of perspectives. In the near future, I plan to set some of these blind men loose, and see what they grab…

The Case for oBIX in Laboratory systems

Well, if not oBIX, something like it.

Most data in modern research is collected by automated systems. Computers assess, quantify, and print out data. Some may be able to produce spreadsheets. Some produce graphs. (I remember measuring graphs with great care to turn them back into numbers in a previous career). Some may extrude CSV (comma separated values) files, to be imported into databases. But almost everything starts with machine measure and tabulation.

Often the information you need to understand the experiment has been recorded, but it is only available in a nearby system that the researcher either has no access to, or does not know he can get.

The biologist who recently asked for access to our operations data is one example. He works with plants in greenhouses. Greenhouses strive for, but do not always produce, specialized conditions. Understanding plants, and small differences in growing plants, often involves understanding the conditions they grew in precisely. We have a system that tracks minute by minute the temperature and humidity of the areas it monitors. In areas in which natural lighting is being used and augmented, light levels are also tracked. This researcher asked for access to the minute by minute temperature, humidity, and light for each zone in the greenhouses. What is wonderful about this request is that we can provide it essentially for free

There other systems, specialized systems that researchers work around. Back when I worked in a Biochemistry lab, we had large variances in the reactivity of the materials we worked in. After half a year, I guessed that these problems were caused by variances in the level of liquid hydrogen in the large carboys we stored samples in. Today, those carboys are replaced by ultralow freezers. While I never could prove this, I got outstanding results by working straight through (a 50 hour shift every other week) and thus eliminating variability. You can find the results on the web if you are interested in quassinoids.

There is a large cancer research center on campus. As part of the background for each grant that it submits, it includes general material on the quality of the facilities and how they enhance the research performed therein. One of the pillars of quality is an ultralow freezer tracking system.

This system monitors all the laboratory freezers in the building. Data on the quality of the freezer systems is carefully monitored. Each freezer has its tolerance, and it can be documented that each system stays within its tolerance. This documentation is part of the overall facilities quality report. If your sample is stored here, it will not be accidentally thawed out.

What is not available is any easy way for researchers to access the same information. If they ask the right person, they can get a spreadsheet describing the details of the performance of a particular freezer. They can request these periodically. This system, like most building monitoring systems, has no way to let researchers pull direct feeds of data from the freezer monitoring system. There is no way for one of several researchers using the same freezer to set personal alarms on conditions that matter to him. Most of the researchers are unaware that they can ask for anything.

Every automated laboratory system produces its own special data format. There is an effort underway, UnitsML, that hopes to establish a data standard for every measurable physical condition. All testing runs, all data, will be able to be delivered in a standard UnitsML format.

When the researcher can freely get to information on conditions whether from Laboratory equipment, from specialized laboratory infrastructure, and from buildings in self describing formats over the internet, then better analysis is possible. When students can use this information as well, without too many people interfering with experimental conditions, than education is improved.

I could go on…but the motto of out Building System integrator seems appropriate here. “No Data Left Behind!” These words are good for research as well as for building operations.