Cognitive functions, Autonomy, and Integration

Everywhere we look, we see more higher-level, almost cognitive functions being incorporated into low-level products. Cameras are internalizing much of the craft of photography. GPS systems are comparing notes with their peers to provide up to the minute routing choices. Cars tune themselves on the fly, adjusting carburetion and suspension in real time to respond to driving style. Systems are becoming autonomous, competition is moving from commodity functions to service, and markets are starting to turn around interactions and integration.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (see link below) described FotoNation and the software that it provides for many brands of digital cameras. I knew about anti-red-eye electronics. I thought it was a neat trick for the camera to automatically focus on faces in the foreground rather than the between them in the center of the view. I was amused at the camera that would alert the picture taker that someone blinked. The camera that delayed the shutter until everyone was smiling was pretty neat.

The ability of a camera to recognize particular faces in the crowd, and make sure that they, if no one else are in focus was different from the rest. Simply take several pictures of your family and friends, and notify the camera. Thereafter if six mothers, standing in the same place each snap a picture at the third grade play, the six cameras will make different decisions and each mother will find her own little Billy in perfect focus.

We now have consumer electronics with complex learning behavior that it applies to its canned pattern recognition tricks. This is customization far beyond the last generation of, say, a car remembering driver preferences for mirror, steering wheel, and seat.

Consumer systems now cover for the amateurish efforts of their operators to produce first class results. Harried amateur photographers get assistance to achieve professional results. Drivers can get performance out of their cars that previously would have required long practice. Trip planning now acquired the knowledge of a local and an instant awareness of traffic conditions.

Building systems face the same issues and are moving in the same direction. Not only are they often operated by amateurs, but the may be maintained by the insufficiently trained—following their installation by the low bidder. Traditionally, systems have been oversized and over-built, to cover these predictable problems. This leaves a lot of energy and operating dollars on the table. The best systems will move instead to make their systems resilient, as are the camera and the car, and self operating.

This will change the tasks asked of control systems, and how they are integrated. Self tuning systems do not need to share low-level details with those far away. Low level protocols will be confined inside autonomous systems, and only higher-level services exposed. These interfaces will be the basis for next generation integration.

Systems will use these newer interfaces to negotiate service provisioning with each other. Although each system should work alone, they should be able to discover resources that each other makes available. Imagine systems advertising their waste heat as a resource, and then the heat source broadcasting when it needs to shut down. These interfaces will be developed as agents; they know their missions, they defend their missions, they act independently.

Integration will come to assume autonomy, for the new interactions will rely on each system doing what it says, and meeting its contracts. Contract-based integration will increase the value of cognitive performance, as they become the only competitive edge in a world of commodity electronics and unpredictable installations.

And systems that expect to be told what to do, rather than simply meeting their contracts? Well, as now, no one will want to do business with such agents.

Getting excited about FIATECH next week.

While I have attended a FIATECH charrette and teleconference or two, I am looking forward to my first FIATECH Conference down in New Orleans next week. It was very tempting to place the oBIX development process as a FIATECH project a few years back. In the end, we decided that it was more important to place oBIX among the e-commerce standards at OASIS, but I have long had a solid appreciation for the vision in the capital projects technology roadmap.

Several of the FIATECH projects are this year coming out of the woodwork after a quiet period. This is normal for new technologies and methods. Initial excitement is followed by disillusionment, which is followed by actual use.

A speaker observed last year at an OASIS conference that those of us who understand Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) should hunker down for a few years of abuse. Vendors have oversold products that may have a few symptoms of the approach, but substitute products and slogans for the hard work of thinking about the business. (Pretty much any product that includes the phrase “Enterprise Service Bus” fits this description.) The speaker went on to observe that the season of disillusionment was at hand.

Several FIATECH initiatives have gone through this cycle. FIATECH is now one of the main loci for ISO 15926 efforts. ISO 15926 started life as "Industrial automation systems and integration—Integration of life-cycle data for process plants including oil and gas production facilities" This work slowed when half done, only to be revived as a FIATECH project. There it has developed a generic data model and Reference Data Library for process plants, and has become the most compelling standard for modeling any state information. We have discussed within oBIX whether we can adopt some of the ISO 15926, now considered a general purpose standard for data integration, sharing, exchange, and hand-over between computer systems. I am looking forward to learning more about ISO 15926 this week.

By most accounts, BIM (Building Information Modeling) has also served its years in the wilderness, and come out of the crucible as buildingSmart. FIATECH remains one of the best forums to discuss real life BIM experiences across a wide range of construction activities.

This year, with FIATECH meeting in New Orleans, Kimon Onuma is launching BIMStorm New Orleans. I very much hope that he can carve out a little time to talk to me. His planning system provides an astonishing nexus for live data exchange between tools and purposes of BIM related information. When I look at OPS, however, I see a tool just as interesting for operating a building, for pulling modeled information out of building systems to produce building dashboards. I also see the potential for an integrated operations repository, particularly useful with outsourced maintenance and analytics.

I recently accepted a request to become co-champion of Element 5 of FIATECH’s Capital Projects Roadmap. Element 5 is titled Intelligent, Self-Maintaining and Repairing Operational Facilities. I will be presenting a talk aligned with that entitled “The Enterprise-Responsive Facility”

Informational Interoperability

Power grid reliability, human heat pumps, and data centers as energy resources – what is the common thread? All of these rely on being to get above the details of the systems to see interrelationships between the systems. This approach requires systems to compete on delivering of service, rather than focusing on process. Systems that provide a similar service, albeit with fundamentally different internal processes, must be swappable.

We must move beyond protocol interoperability to informational interoperability.

In engineered systems, interoperability usually means “we can get some signal of some kind between systems”. That signal is data oriented, meaning it is a raw fact that is neither actionable nor useful on its own. Someone with deep domain knowledge program the interactions around those facts. This leads to over-integration between systems.

Informational interoperability raises the bar, by allowing systems to compete on performance and service. Data is not information; often too much data can hide information. Only when facts from the underlying process are assembled into patterns that have meaning and can influence action does data rise to the level of information.

If you have two or more systems that can both consume and produce the same information interface, then those systems are informationally interoperable. If several external systems share the same informational interface to the local system while performing different services, then the local systems interface is reusable.

If I am performing an energy intensive task such as intake reheating, it matters little if my heat source is electric coils, a central steam plant, a solar thermal collector, or the data center downstairs. Each has a cost (which may even be negative), each has a quality, and each has performance characteristics. Systems with informational interfaces can select or which thermal source to use, either at design time or on the fly. Such systems would not need to know any details about the internal operations of their design source.

The best system interactions are built using reusable informational interfaces. The most accepted and best understood reusable informational interface is money. Money provides actionable information about scarcity and value. Monetary interfaces are highly re-useable and interoperable.

Bad systems hide information about performance, scarcity, and value; good systems expose such information in ways that allow innovators to take advantage of this information. Let the systems use whatever low-level protocols they want internally. On the outside, we need information interoperability.