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”

Give me a Compliant Agent

Compliance is one of the new critical services that intelligent systems can offer buildings and their owners. Compliance is performance plus documentation. Compliance adds value to any process. Compliance can convert a process into a service. Compliance is what lets you know what it is that you have.

Traditionally, compliance is the concern of those with legal requirements. Pharmaceutical manufacture needs to be performed within environmental conditions defined during their approval process. Animal quarters must be maintained in accord with defined best practices. Clinical spaces must be maintained in accord with licensing requirements. Pharmacies must maintain conditions that keep their delicate supplies active.

Compliance also preserves and improves value. Recently, landlords have found that tenants will pay more if buildings are green, but only if the owner can prove it. Energy saving reductions can reduce building healthfulness—monitoring compliance with such standards as those developed by the Healthy Building Institute will prove that health is not being sacrificed to efficiency. Sooner rather than later, tenants will demand and reward provable quality of service (QOS) measurements.

Unfortunately, compliance for building systems tends to be bolted on rather than recognized as an original requirement. Bolted on solutions are not very good. Customer expectations for this market are low. Market expectations are low. There are no common definitions to grow/validate this market.

We need to define a common framework for validation of environmental spaces, define a compliance information exchange as a buildingSmart Information Delivery Model (IDM). IDMs are how information standards fit into buildingSmart. Defined IDMs for compliance will enable designers to incorporate compliance needs into buildings plans at an earlier stage.

Pharmaceutical manufacturing environments, animal research facilities, medicine storage areas in pharmacies, and data centers (to grab a wide handful) all may wish a common data payload. Let’s say that, for the sake of argument, that the requirement of all these what I would call “regulated environment spaces” is Provide a narrow temperature with a tolerance of T’, a humidity of H with a maximum variance of H’, and the ability to document same for compliance checking at an interval not to exceed M minutes. Animal Quarters might need a Ventilation number as well. To add in microelectronics/virus research, we might need Pressure standards.

The IDM becomes a standards-based way to deliver compliance information to the enterprise. The IDM also becomes the basis for specifying the systems that you are revealing, defining standards for autonomous commissioning of the regulated environment space. The same IDM also then become the basis for specification and energy modeling.

Interoperate or Fade Away

Control systems have been complacent, ignoring real enterprise standards, accepting poor interfaces with not very useful WSDL. They do this, because they can. Control system vendors just assume that the old ways will go on forever, that they can sprinkle a little XML on their control streams, and declare they have an enterprise interface,

Well not any more. Two players who may not understand the underlying systems, but who do understand enterprise interfaces have entered the market.

First, a an old conference acquaintance of mine sent me the following link from Microsoft. Microsoft Research has what is essentially a science fair each year. The following is a link from this year’s MR fair, and a development called Tine Web Services.

We will demonstrate a low-power, low-cost Web-service implementation for devices that must run on batteries for several years, such as smoke detectors and window-break sensors. In particular, we will show a prototype system of WSDL/TCP/IP over a low data rate 802.15.4 radio used in home automation. The Web-service interface makes it easy for multiple programmers to develop home-control applications using devices manufactured by different OEMs without learning new programming technologies. Our system also provides a uniform setup experience for users, enabling them to integrate multiple home devices into a single network. We also will demonstrate how a home network can be connected safely to the Internet to be accessed from cloud services. We will present a feedback-based, multiradio scheduling algorithm for energy-efficient communication among battery-operated devices. Finally, we will demonstrate an energy-management application that saves energy by actively monitoring weather and energy price variations using cloud services without compromising user comfort. This example application can be used to connect the 166 million U.S. homes and several million more worldwide to the Microsoft cloud for providing energy management. This application can generate a steady revenue stream for Live services that does not depend on user clicks. It also reduces our carbon footprint and leads to a greener lifestyle.

See the video here: http://research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/techfest/videos/video_e.aspx

The price point is not where it needs to be, but it is not production either.

In other news, I heard rumors today about a CISCO initiative to bind WS-Reliable messaging built around lightweight EBXML to the building system. I have no real information on this initiative yet, but it does sound like writing a generic Android program for this interface would be a breeze.

So the game is engaged. Control systems vendors can actually begin to offer common informational interfaces, and compete around performance and service, or they can compete with the Thais for the market left after the Chinese are done. It should be an interesting five years.