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.

What the Owner should know about NBIMS during Building Design and Construction

In a previous post, (Building Information Modeling),I described Building Modeling, the Building Information Model, and the difference between them. Here I will to describe how I see the use of BIM changing the process of acquiring a new facility.

The National BIM Standard (NBIMS) is based on the internationally accepted IFC data standards. The IFC standards include early capture of site information, of design and program goals, of regulatory requirements, and of contract information. The NBIMS process, by capturing this information at each stage of the process, is able to verify whether these needs are met as the project progresses through design and construction.

Where CAD automated the Drafting process, Building Modeling fundamentally changes the design process. Drawings become mere views of the model. Designers can try out the models before the building is built, allowing iterations of design in which function is tested, in the same way that boat and aircraft designs have been tested in advance of construction.

There is an odd market dynamic going on right now. The best designers use a BIM that they do not share. The best Contractors develop their own BIM to produce their bid and to guide their construction process; they do not share this lest it increase their liability. The owner receives no BIM at all. Somehow, we can afford to throw out two BIMs but we cannot afford to share one. The forward thinking owner will reduce costs and receive higher quality by contracting for the maintenance and sharing of a single BIM through design and construction.

Emerging best practices, with names like Green Design, or Sustainable Design, or LEEDS, develop an energy model as part of the design process. The energy model looks at the design decisions and computes how much energy the building will use when operating. The energy model can then be compared to the design intents, and changes made to improve the design.

Energy Modeling should be an intrinsic part of design that extends throughout the life of a building. Too many of today’s energy models are merely grafted onto the design process without intrinsic link to the design. New modeling tools are now able to read the BIM directly to produce energy models. This turns Energy Modeling into a means to “commission” the design prior to construction. It also means that the effects of value engineering on cost of operations can be re-computed easily.

Even the best of traditional CAD-based design leaves many problems undiscovered. Building systems are designed by different teams and rendered on different flat pieces of paper. If, say, the ductwork and the electrical conduit run through the same space, it may only be discovered during construction, when it is more expensive. Delays and expensive change orders are the natural result.

Experienced contractors understand these deficiencies in traditional design. They add some margin into their bids to cover errors and oversights, and to allow for the inevitable inaccuracies and missing components. Early experience suggests that if a building is defined using BIM, and if the BIM is shared with the contractors during the bid process, that the bids will come in lower than if traditional blueprints only are shared. The ensuing reduction in change orders, and the resulting on-time delivery, are additional financial benefits.

Abstract the Interfaces

If we are going to build very large systems, we will need to break it into self managing units, and build systems of systems. There is too much complexity and variability to establish any type of top-down order on embedded systems. Even if we could define the “optimum system”, we could still not use it for something as large as the power grid.

Suppose we did. Suppose we picked a technology and said “This is what each building shall have!” In 20 years we would still be trying to get all systems upgraded – and we would be mandating 20 year old technology. We simply cannot make rigid decisions for anything so large, so extended, and maintained by so many people.

We can only manage such a large scale by hiding complexity. We must hide complexity by defining certain simple big picture interactions that encompass all the little decisions. We will never get support for central coordination if by doing so, we remove personal control from systems. To define these simple actions, we need to reach for commonly agreed upon semantics to describe the operations we want systems to follow.

I want to place Intelligent Buildings as fully actualized agents on an Intelligent Grid. To do that, I hope to leverage the Building Information Model (NBIMS) to discover abstract interfaces to the point-by-point complexity of the underlying control systems. Rather than create these abstract interfaces from scratch, I hope that the pre-existing interfaces between the Building Model and Energy Models could be a good starting point. I want to avoid the complexity of introducing Yet Another Acronym and Yet Another Interface, and thereby avoid increasing complexity.

Abstract interfaces that hide rather than reveal complexity are the key. Here is an example from within oBIX discussions. When we discussed abstract interfaces for scheduling, each control system developer quickly claimed that “scheduling systems algorithms are quite complex, and there nearly impossible to align.” Spirited discussions ensued about factoring how long it takes to air condition a room in advance. Should we factor in humidity. and on. and on.

But there is already a standard for scheduling. We each receive ICAL invitations to meetings scheduled on the internet. ICAL is a W3 specification, meaning it is defined by the same folks who define how we display web pages. Our personal systems know how to adjust for where we are in the world, including such local oddities as when Daylight Savings Time begins. Each of us considers whether we have to drive to the meeting, or fly, or simply be near a phone. Those details are not the concern of the interface but of each participant and of the complex systems we represent. I want to simply invite the conference room or class room to an event on a certain date, with a certain number of attendees anticipated.

If these questions are answered correctly, they expand the value of capital assets by extending their ability to provide services and amenities to the owners and tenants, not merely to avoid costs. An Energy Model consists of Envelope, Weather, and System Operations. An abstract interface that works for energy modeling could be re-usable in tuning System Operations in response to Weather Predictions to improve quality of service provided. It becomes the basis for external system analytics to enable predictive maintenance and thereby economically provide enhanced reliability.

Abstract interfaces are the first step to defining services. Services are the key to continental-scale integration. Services allow for internal intelligence to support local imperatives. We can call that local intelligence an Agent. Agents are the key to large scale interaction, because they can assume responsibility for local operating details. Semantics are important, because we must have some common vocabulary to communicate with the local agents.

It almost goes without saying that any agent would be offended if you tried to communicate past its semantic surface. Even your kids will get in trouble if, instead of asking for money on a Saturday night, or perhaps even volunteering for chores, they reach directly right into your wallet. The surfaces of services must be inviolate.

And that is how we will handle the complexity of integrating a continental-scale power grid with its end nodes.