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.

EBMS – Slogging through the Details

This post continues a series about a particular large system at UNC

The first hurdle we had to solve in our EBMS project was containing all building controls protocol traffic and keeping it off the enterprise backbone. We used a variety of approaches for this, as we had considerable diversity in our installed base. Some systems ad compatible purpose-based hardware that we could plug right in. For others, embedded Linux systems translating older protocols to Web Services were available. For still others, we had to craft custom integrations running on top of a Windows PCs. We carefully defined a distinction between Operations and Maintenance/Configuration. You can think of it as the difference between driving a car and performing service on a car.

Under EBMS, we operate and monitor all buildings using exclusively Web Services. This transition enabled us to get our first buy-in from the enterprise IT group. The network demands and fragility of traditional control protocols caused them many problems. We simplified their life by using only well understood and well behaved web services.

We called the gateway between intra-building control interactions and extra-building monitoring and operations the Enterprise Building Local Gateway (EBLG). We had to accept some diversity of EBLG to encapsulate the much greater range of underlying systems, protocols, and even product cycles.

The most obsolete systems were fronted by oBIX surfaced JACES from Tridium

Standard vendor web services were used for many systems, including iLONs and TAC Soap Services.

Custom mappings of many systems were created using GridLogix software atop Windows XP.

Configuration and maintenance remains un-standardized. We installed Local Control Stations (LCS) for many of the buildings. Each LCS is a locked-down domain-secured PC running Windows XP. The proprietary applications for configuration and control for each building were installed on the local LCS. Some effort was required to make these applications work because of the outdated programming and security models that are rife in the building controls industry. These efforts paid off in that we were able to fully secure these systems for the campus network and to use managed patch application to keep them secure. Control system technicians are authorized to access these systems by remote desktop based upon their organizational position and status.

These are the key components of EBMS. We allow only standard well-known, well-behaved protocols on the campus backbone. We reduced the number of building interfaces to as few variants of web services as we could. All PC-based systems in EBMS are centrally managed, with policy-based patch management and security control. All systems allow remote access using directory enabled security. Technicians can get to the systems they support remotely using the account and password they use to perform the rest of their work.

Thinking about what I want

Yesterday, the FIATECH focus group met to review the Capital Projects Technology Roadmap. I sat in as representative for the roadmap’s Element 5. Element 5 is titled The Intelligent Self Maintaining Self Repairing Facility. In case you were wondering, last night’s post was a summary of Element 9 from the roadmap. On the way, I stopped in the Frederick, Maryland, IHOP, fueling up and planning what I would say if they asked me what I, or the 5^th Element, required as top priorities.

BIM for Control Systems

No one is using BIM to define control systems. Just as chip design was the last part of electronics fabrication to be computerized, the most technical part of construction is the last to be designed. As the Director of Buildings at UNC once said, “Control systems are designed by a man standing on a bucket.”

BIM for control systems will codify standards for design and develop formal semantics for the services provided by each control system. These system semantics will be linked to the formal performance metrics to measure explicit performance goals. Retro-commissioners know that the problem restoring systems to their original design is that, in many cases, the design does not work. If these systems were fully designed, they would.

Life Cycle Commissioning

Design intents should indicate goals for building performance. When a building model is developed, the energy model should be run directly out of the building model. The energy model should then be compared to the design intents. The energy model, then, becomes a means of commissioning the design against the design intents. The process should be repeated as the design is changed, particularly after value engineering. These energy models then become the basis for traditional commissioning.

The performance goals and metrics developed early in the process are then available to the traditional commissioning agent. The commissioning information should be entered into the building information store to be readily available to service personnel or retro-commissioners.

Since many of the measurements are based upon designed control system metrics, there is no reason not to take those measurements every day – and analyze them as well. Instead of waiting for system components to fail, this would allow regular review of how each system is performing as a system.

Service Oriented Building Systems

One we have the building semantics and building metrics defined during design, then we have the core pieces we need expose control system interfaces as services. No one other than maintenance personnel ever has a reason to issue instructions to a building system except through a service interface. Services hide complex processes and expose only those interactions that are appropriate for the tenant, the landlord, or the enterprise system.

Security definitions of standard roles.

We need standard role definitions to control access to the service oriented building systems. Based upon design intents, the designer can assign particular functions to roles known to the building system. A first pass might be, in order decreasing privilege, Operator, Landlord, Tenant, Visitor, Guest. Maintenance would not be restricted to working through the service interface, and so needs no special role.

Along with roles, we need standards for defining building zones. Zones might be rooms or groups of rooms. They might be determined by cooling system or by security needs.

The job of the building systems integrator then becomes matching control functions and sensor points to zones and assigning internal operations to roles. With identity determined by a third party, the intersection of zones and roles as assigned to each identity provides the basis for secure interoperable building operations.

So that’s my wish list. Too bad I had to leave after one day to go to Grid-Interop…they never got to ask.

Lifecycle Data Management and Information Integration

(This post was prepared during a FIATECH workshop on capital project priorities)

Do you find capital projects seem to ask the same questions again and again. Promises made in programming are lost in delivery. Contractors are unable to guess what the designers wanted. It can be hard to discover if you got what you asked for, and if everything works as promised. Do you wonder if your staff will be able to maintain a new facility in the right way, with the right parts, so you are unsure you will get full value from your investment?

Background:

A 2005 NIST study of the costs of poor interoperability estimated that $16 billion was lost each year in the capital industry.

Vision:

All information associated with the design, construction, and operation of a building is captured and maintained for the life of the asset. Standard interfaces let any authorized person access the information they need using the tool they want. All design information and choices are available to the contractor during construction. During building handover, the commissioning agent compares results to the goals and promises made during design. Maintenance personnel have direct access to all information they need for best results.

Challenges:

The most significant challenges are cultural and organizational rather than technical. Contracts must demand delivery and sharing of all information in existing standard formats. Business processes need to be recast to reflect new responsibilities and liabilities; contract language must be adjusted.

Benefits:

Eliminating the costs of re-creating data and improving operations through appropriate access to information will reduce costs of acquisition and preserve asset value. Common data formats will improve interoperability at every stage of the facility life-cycle, increasing accuracy. Interoperability will increase competition and drive innovation while increasing accountability.

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