When will an Android run your Building?

Google is slowly doing the unthinkable—insinuating an open operating system into the cellular phone market. Google's stated goal for Android is to create a mobile platform that makes surfing the Web from a smart phone as painless as surfing it from a PC.

Android, if successful in getting a foothold, is predicted to launch a whole new ecosystem of cell-phone apps, all able to communicate using internet standards. The chipmaker ARM, whose chips currently power 90 per cent of all mobile devices, will be showing off Android running on their hardware at next week’s Mobile World Congress.

With oBIX, every building system can be operated remotely using only standard interaction patterns of the web. There is now no reason that any system can’t be operated from a cell phone. That is not entirely new—there have been products for years that allow this in a limited way. Existing products have been for limited use with particular hardware in special circumstances. Those who needed them got them as a lagniappe on top of an expensive custom integration.

oBIX 1.1, currently in draft, will offer RSS/Atom style subscriptions. With RSS subscriptions, you can subscribe to a news sources and receive it on any number of applications that can receive news feeds. You could even have the information you are tracking on your Google home page.

What if you could download to and run this kind of application on your phone yourself? What application would you choose? How would you select one application over another? In other words, what will we do when we can get to information and function so easily?

Open standards, open interfaces, open cell phones…what will you write today?

Beyond Efficiency, Beyond Sustainability

Regular readers know that sustainable buildings are not sustainable unless their inhabitants are willing to continue using their features. Nothing is less sustainable than the feature that is uncomfortable, or awkward to use. For the owner of commercial buildings, the desired amenities are ones that reduce costs, or extend asset life while reducing tenant inconvenience.

Building Systems that support agile integration open up realms of integration for everyday use. These functions have been available, at great expense, for those who absolutely required them. Others have been adopted by those are simply driven, like the energy strategies used by those who live off the grid. These functions, and the amenities they offer, will make the the operating efficiencies they also provide sustainable.

So what kinds of new abilities will real sustainable buildings offer? Access to information will allow all service providers to improve operating efficiencies and to offer new and enhanced services. Whether the service providers be life safety related or task (contract) related, operating efficiencies allows improved use of resources while reducing risk and liability. Below are some benefits that intelligent, agile integration will offer to building operators:

• Knowledge Systems for Autonomous Maintenance –Intelligent systems able to determine and communicate maintenance and repair needs based on defined requirements (e.g., reliability predictions/calculations) vs. measured performance and sensed and assessed condition.
• Automation Technologies for Life-Limiting Factors - Able to detect, assess, and repair materials, structures, equipment, and systems affected by corrosion, fatigue, breakage, stress, and other life-limiting factors.
• Automation Technologies for Critical Performance Factors - Able to detect, assess, and repair materials, structures, equipment, and systems with respect to safety, security, health, and environmental issues.
• Facility Condition Knowledge Base & Baseline - Real-time human and machine access, both locally and remotely, to as-built/installed configurations, maintenance/repair history, and material/equipment life predictions.
• Uniform Equipment/Process Information Standards - Digital documentation and sharing of data on material and equipment properties and characteristics (including simulation models) and O&M best practices.
• Sharable Standard Equipment/Process Models - Mathematically accurate 3-D simulation and performance models for all forms of material and equipment, such that vendor-provided models can be "plugged together" into the master facility simulation model.
• Facility O&M Advisory System - Intelligent advisory systems able to process status information from all facility sensors and systems in real time and make optimum recommendations for proactive and corrective actions (including emergency response) and which is able to implement the desired actions through automated command and control systems and through communication with O&M personnel.
• Integrated Safety/Security Systems - Continuous monitoring for safety/security hazards and threats from personnel, equipment, and materials and provide automated tracking and alerting capability when a hazard is detected or suspected.
• Facility O&M Systems Integration – Connection of the facility O&M system to higher-level enterprise management systems, enabling passing of status and activity information to enterprise functions such as business planning, labor allocation, resupply, and other site support functions.
• Enterprise O&M Systems Integration –Connection of the facility O&M system to customers, equipment/material suppliers/manufacturers, and automated design advisory systems, including the feedback of maintenance/repair results/data to the master facility simulation model.
• Enterprise Control Model Linkages - Feedback of maintenance and repair results and data to process-level, facility-level, and enterprise-level knowledge systems, enabling visibility of performance and issues, real-time updating of operational control models, and extension of the planning and design knowledge bases.
• Shared O&M Knowledge Bases - Accessible databases of maintenance and repair experience for different kinds of capital projects/facilities, enabling the sharing of expertise across the industry with appropriate provisions for anonymity, security, and intellectual property protection.

These higher order activities require common building semantics (naming of things) BuildingSmart looks to be the only game in town for capital asset semantics. These semantics will unify the information coming from the sensors below into objects intelligible to the building owner.

Building Operations get Sassy

Ken Sinclair and I were recently talking about SaaS and how it affects the Automated Building world. We concluded that SaaS was not only going to be big in traditional applications such as Building Monitoring and Energy Management, but would open up whole new areas of building analytics and advanced services.

SaaS is short for Software as a Service. SaaS is the evolutionary advancement of the Application Service Provider (ASP) market from a few years ago. In simplest terms, ASP involved taking an existing application and hosting it on a server in the sky. Some ASP used remote desktop approaches based on software such as Citrix. Others skinned existing applications with a web user interface. Security, management, and patching of the server were managed by the hosting provider. In some cases, the provider was the original developer and the product was more affordable under a leasing agreement than an outright purchase.

SaaS went beyond ASP to leverage the new approaches we learned as applications moved to the web. Applications were re-crafted to expose web services to remote applications. Other hosters leveraged advanced business process knowledge and made it part of the offering. As seamless interactions with other systems became paramount, these new services co-evolved the practices now known as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the Service rather than the Application became paramount. The name SaaS crept into parlance 3 years ago.

SaaS finds its natural home in Cloud Computing. Clouds are very large groups of machines hosting still greater numbers of virtual machines to provide computing power. Google has long used a computing cloud for its internal processes. Microsoft plans to build many cloud centers in the next few years; I look to cloud computing to be the area of fiercest competition amongst these two in the near future. IBM, Sun, and Intel have their own clod strategies. SaaS will live in the clouds.

I have described such data centers before when describing the Green Grid initiative ( /articles/the-green-grid.html ). Clouds and the green grid offer many innovative approaches to energy management before the first Energy Management SaaS application arrives. Intel “sundowns” software services using cloud centers around the world; as night follows day and cheaper electricity follows night, services up in the clouds move around the world. Energy-intensive processing power moves to where it is cheapest.

Cloud-hosting of SaaS offers the greatest savings for application with non-level usage. Such applications can appear on virtual machines when needed and vanish from the cloud when not in use. When re-requested, the virtual machine, unchanged since last used, can be re-created on the fly.

Traditional energy management and building operations are sure to move into the service world. As building systems acquire web-ready surfaces, then the monitoring and operation of those systems can move up to SaaS. Advanced building analytics services, perhaps in quite different clouds, will interact with these services. Such offerings will fare far better when managed using domain-specific knowledge that the local landlord will not have on staff.

Architects are developing what they call Integrated Practice as they move into the realm of BIM and buildingSmart. Integrated practice calls for a central data repository during the life of a project, available to and used by all who contribute to the design as well as to the contractors building the building. So-called BIM servers are a natural fit for SaaS in clouds, as they are only occasionally used, but require detailed domain knowledge to operate.

Regular readers know that I want the Building Model to be the source of interface and semantics for operating control systems in the building. BIM servers in the clouds can provide on-demand semantics and schematics to energy monitoring and building operations services.

There may be clouds in your future. And that’s a good thing.