Building Operations get Sassy

Ken Sinclair and I were recently talking about SaaS and how it affects the Automated Building world. We concluded that SaaS was not only going to be big in traditional applications such as Building Monitoring and Energy Management, but would open up whole new areas of building analytics and advanced services.

SaaS is short for Software as a Service. SaaS is the evolutionary advancement of the Application Service Provider (ASP) market from a few years ago. In simplest terms, ASP involved taking an existing application and hosting it on a server in the sky. Some ASP used remote desktop approaches based on software such as Citrix. Others skinned existing applications with a web user interface. Security, management, and patching of the server were managed by the hosting provider. In some cases, the provider was the original developer and the product was more affordable under a leasing agreement than an outright purchase.

SaaS went beyond ASP to leverage the new approaches we learned as applications moved to the web. Applications were re-crafted to expose web services to remote applications. Other hosters leveraged advanced business process knowledge and made it part of the offering. As seamless interactions with other systems became paramount, these new services co-evolved the practices now known as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the Service rather than the Application became paramount. The name SaaS crept into parlance 3 years ago.

SaaS finds its natural home in Cloud Computing. Clouds are very large groups of machines hosting still greater numbers of virtual machines to provide computing power. Google has long used a computing cloud for its internal processes. Microsoft plans to build many cloud centers in the next few years; I look to cloud computing to be the area of fiercest competition amongst these two in the near future. IBM, Sun, and Intel have their own clod strategies. SaaS will live in the clouds.

I have described such data centers before when describing the Green Grid initiative ( /articles/the-green-grid.html ). Clouds and the green grid offer many innovative approaches to energy management before the first Energy Management SaaS application arrives. Intel “sundowns” software services using cloud centers around the world; as night follows day and cheaper electricity follows night, services up in the clouds move around the world. Energy-intensive processing power moves to where it is cheapest.

Cloud-hosting of SaaS offers the greatest savings for application with non-level usage. Such applications can appear on virtual machines when needed and vanish from the cloud when not in use. When re-requested, the virtual machine, unchanged since last used, can be re-created on the fly.

Traditional energy management and building operations are sure to move into the service world. As building systems acquire web-ready surfaces, then the monitoring and operation of those systems can move up to SaaS. Advanced building analytics services, perhaps in quite different clouds, will interact with these services. Such offerings will fare far better when managed using domain-specific knowledge that the local landlord will not have on staff.

Architects are developing what they call Integrated Practice as they move into the realm of BIM and buildingSmart. Integrated practice calls for a central data repository during the life of a project, available to and used by all who contribute to the design as well as to the contractors building the building. So-called BIM servers are a natural fit for SaaS in clouds, as they are only occasionally used, but require detailed domain knowledge to operate.

Regular readers know that I want the Building Model to be the source of interface and semantics for operating control systems in the building. BIM servers in the clouds can provide on-demand semantics and schematics to energy monitoring and building operations services.

There may be clouds in your future. And that’s a good thing.

No Yawns this time

I remember the last push for energy efficiency. At UNC, we still have some of the buildings built during the last energy crunch. These buildings are known as a good place for a nap in the afternoon. One that houses fruit fly research has a slow sweet redolence of nutrient solution fruit fly nutrients. This smell combines with the general lack of oxygen in this early efficient building to put any inhabitant into a deep sleep.

The Healthy Building Institute (HBI) wants to address this. The HBI is a new group, akin to the Green Building Council in scope and organization. It is not one of the many groups, including Healthy Buildings International with similar names and acronyms.

The mission of the HBI is simple: Buildings that do not harm humans. The HBI wants to update the ventilation and air quality standards (among other things) to what is actually needed for the people who are actually in the room. Just as important, the HBI wants to be able to monitor and document performance of space to HBI standards.

If they pull this off, then the metrics will be another use for building systems that are able to expose their activities as services for consumption by enterprise systems.. HBI monitoring would be a separate service, usable by multiple external systems, and outside of the centralized control functions.

Some owners will object to this model, because they fear potential liability. Some building operators will object because they do not want anyone to look over their shoulder. The best operators will incorporate such metrics into their service level agreements, and demand premiums for better work. The more sophisticated owners will advertise their numbers to attain higher rents and higher occupancy.

The LEED and Sustainability crowd should welcome HBI metrics as well. As I noted in my post Sustaining Sustainability, nothing would be less surprising than for the public to lose interest in Sustainability as the current crises fade. If high performing buildings have lethargic tenants, then the new approaches will not last long. HBI metrics read directly off the building system interfaces by third parties will provide the feedback to keep sustainable buildings healthful and productive. Healthful and productive buildings will stay green.

The biggest expense in creating responsive interoperable building systems will be the definition of the first surface. That may support Monitoring and Operations. It may support Demand Response. Thereafter, each surface comes with minimal additional cost. If that additional cost lest owners demonstrate superior healthfulness, than it provided the commercial owner a method to regain all of his investment in intelligent buildings from increased rents and re-sale.

Look for opportunities to leverage enhanced building operations with HBI metrics. Start using standard interfaces to systems now, so that you can add HBI as it is defined. And watch those yawns.

Aligning Time, Space, and Energy

Whenever time, space and energy are misaligned, you are spending too much. NBIMS (National Building Information Model Standard), now buildingSmart, is a standard for the definition and creation of space for work and life. The functions inside buildings are the largest users of energy in North America. Time is the missing component, the piece which is never aligned.

When we use energy at the wrong time, we require too much from the power grid. When we do not know the scarcity or plenty of energy, we will not use energy at the right time. Energy availability has seasons, as do other perishable commodities such as fruits and vegetables. Where the seasons of produce are the seasons of the year, the seasons of energy are the hours of the day. Using energy in the afternoon is like consuming raspberries in February, a profligate act. To know the scarcity or abundance of energy, we must have pricing that varies during the day.

When buildings are uncommunicative, they cannot respond to our needs for space. They cannot prepare space to be optimal when we need it. The cannot release their claim on the energy needed to prepare space when we do not need it. If we cannot communicate with buildings whether one person or twenty will use space, then the building must lay claim to the same energy for either case. When we can let buildings know what our space needs are, then they can use energy by preparing just what we need.

If we knew the scarcity of energy, would we change how we move through time and space? Human Resources may tell me to stay at home for a snow emergency. Why not tell me to stay at home for an energy pricing emergency? It would certainly save me time, and a lot of energy, to not commute to a building that is temporarily over-priced.

Space need accurate time. Too many building systems have no way to update time, no way to calibrate their clocks. To be responsive to time signals, building systems must pick up network time as do all other networked systems.

Managing space is old hat.

Managing energy is so ‘70s.

Managing time is in every self help book.

But to manage all three together requires standards, and interoperability.