BSI and a blast from the past

Every now and then I run across an old email that I have long forgotten, but speaks to my current activities. I think that this comment, written long ago in the oBIX forum speaks to something I need to return to. Jon recently gave me and WS-Calendar and EMIX some excellent advice on on creating standards for re-use and extension.

-----Original Message-----
From: Considine, Toby (Facilities Technology Office)
Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 6:36 AM
To: 'jon.bosak@sun.com'
Cc: 'Grobler, Francois ERDC-CERL-IL'
Subject: RE: oBIX Guiding Principles

There are parts of Control Systems that are very business oriented. If an embedded control system detects that it needs maintenance, and can submit a maintenance request to an identified partner, clearly that work order looks like a normal business transaction.

Meeting and occupancy schedules might look like UBL (room will be occupied tomorrow from 2-4; use oBIX to inform HVAC, Access Control, Intrusion Detection, A/V management control systems. Read the Electric Meter before and after the meeting). Does the UBL standard extend the ICAL standard, or subsume it or...? Clearly, there is a benefit for scheduling functions to re-use commonly implemented scheduling requests.

These functions are in the future. What oBIX has to start with doing is exposing the event driven world of controls to the enterprise. For the most part, this starts with state. What are all the room temperatures on the 3rd and 4th floors? For how many hours did the compressors run today?Which areas of the building are currently secured? Some of this information is creeping into QOS agreements in real estate, and so intersects with the work of OSCRE (Open Systems for Commercial Real Estate). To my knowledge, UBL does not really include the nomenclatures for this because this is outside of the normal business functions. Am I wrong? Can you refer me to any relevant portions of UBL?

I think an early use for oBIX will be to provide a platform on which GRIDWISE (www.gridwise.org) type applications are built. That may be the first place where standard UBL functions hit, as price incentives are offered to buildings on the spot market to forefend brown-outs and the like. That feels more like bid/delivery/request rebate.

The construction industry has long had a separate open standard for construction documents, known as the IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) developed by the International Association for Interoperability (http://www.iai-international.org/iai_international/) and already required in many international construction projects. The IFC space includes construction documents, spatial data, spatial modeling, etc. The EU, in particular, leans heavily on this ISO specification, particularly in the Nordic countries. The largest landlord in the world, the GSA, has mandated that all transmittals for the design, construction, and acceptance of buildings. The closely related GBXML (Green Building XML) is a lightweight variant of IFCXML focused more on performance issues. GB Modeling, using GBXML for transferring building performance data, is required for those projects that wish to be designated as compliant with programs using words such as "sustainable" and "LEEDS". We have long considered that IFCML and the closely related GBXML were our most important shared spaces. Is there a defined interface/mapping between IFCXML and UBL?

Thanks for your comments

tc

-----Original Message-----
From: jon.bosak@sun.com
Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 9:20 PM
To: Considine, Toby (Facilities Technology Office)
Subject: Re: oBIX Guiding Principles

| G) If, as seem likely, this document is adopted as an OASIS standard,
| I recommend that we steal freely from this document, reusing as much
| as we can in our rules for developing subsidiary oBIX services as well
| as in the core document. It is well written and defends its decison
| in a language that is focused and apropriate for the enterprise
| developer.

Since UBL is probably going to become the dominant standard for international trade documents, why don't you just adopt the UBL schemas and have done with it? After all, UBL is based on a pretty widely adopted specification (xCBL 3.0) that was developed specifically for electronic marketplaces. If there are any data elements missing from UBL 1.0 that are needed for oBIX, we can probably include them in UBL 1.1.

Jon

Continuous programming for Smart Energy Buildings

Best practices in high performance buildings recommend continuous commissioning. Keeping building systems at peak performance requires knowing what high performance looks like, and how that performance changes over time. But performance requirements change over time. Policy based system management requires that we know the purpose of each room. We need continuous programming for buildings.

Building programming is the name of the pre-design conversations about what an owner expects to get out of a building. Designers ferret out each purpose. The design team and the owners establish clear expectations of the expected performance for each function. Some praxis defines the energy performance expectations for each space as well. This one time activity is complete before serious design begins.

This program should guide the initial commissioning requirements. Does this space support the ventilation requires of a dining area within it energy budget. Does another space meet its energy budget while supporting high-end retail? Does the ventilation support maintaining alert cubicle workers throughout a long day? These considerations can support policy based building system management.

There are two barriers to developing systems to support this model. There is no standard for passing the original program information to the commissioning process. Programs change.

It is quite common at Universities to spend 100 grand to renovate a brand new building. During the years between programming and construction, some purpose changes, some new program started, and 4 offices are now a classroom. The break area is now a data center. The back lab is now a reception space for the new academic discipline; it now has an exterior door. In commercial buildings, each new tenant may have new requirements. Things change

Even without renovations, the building program changes, and with it, the performance requirements. The squash court becomes a spinning class, supporting many sweating exercisers rather than two. The conference room becomes a break room, and adds a refrigerator and microwave. The new break room must be better ventilated, to avoid tormenting the work force with the smell of microwave popcorn. These changes create new program requirements that should in turn update the energy performance requirements.

To meet their promise, LEED buildings need to be commissioned against their designed performance, the design that was built on the original programming. To maintain that performance, this commissioning should be continuous and automated. To keep that commissioning meaningful, it its targets should be updated as the buildings program requirements change. And that requires continuous programming.