Transfer Autonomy to the End User

The fundamental problem with most of the “demand limiting” or “load control” programs out there is that they remove autonomy from the end user. We like choice. We like control. We do not like other people to make choices for us. We do not like to cede control to anyone.

All of the energy saving practices that transfer control of our lives to someone else, be it the Power Company or the Government, will have only short-lived support. We want to wash and dry a shirt this afternoon to wear to the party tonight, and we will pay for it. We want to take a long hot soak in the tub this afternoon, either because of a hard day at work, or to ward off an impending cold. We want to be in charge.

Any energy allocation model that ignores these facts about us as a people will fail. It will suffer from non-participation. If regulated, it will be subject to malicious compliance and sabotage. We must build energy allocation models based upon choice.

The micro-circuitry of GridWise allows appliances to identify themselves and report their individual power usage. The appliances must share their capabilities for saving energy with the house. The web services interfaces of oBIX will allow home, office, and third party applications to discover building systems as they do printers. The smart grid will deliver live electricity pricing to the house.

Software agents, working in our behalf, and under our direction, can negotiate power needs with the systems and appliances, and live pricing with the intelligent grid, to most economically meet our desires.

The house must be guided by its inhabitant. You should wash and dry that shirt you want to wear tonight, fully aware of what doing so at the last minute cost you. You should decide whether to follow the economic rules you set up, or to override them to soak in that tub. The decisions of Comfort vs. Economy, of Amenity vs. Cost, should be made explicit.

And the end user must be in charge.

Information Stewardship

A design firm came on to campus the other day to begin conversations on the new School of Information and Library Science (SILS). Library Science has been one of the more interesting areas of IT in the last few years, as they are positioning themselves as the side of Information Technology (IT) not concerned with the bits and bytes, nor with the collection of data, but with delivery of information.

The Art of the Librarian has always been about the delivery of the right information in the right format at the right time. Google delivers vast amounts of references at your fingertips, each information set and document only a click away. Little Billy in the second grade asks the school Librarian for a book about frogs and his handed a book with lots of pictures and small words. Nine years later, William, now taking AP Biology, asks the school Librarian for a book about frogs and gets an entirely different set of volumes. Librarians know that context determines the correct information.

The design firm knows a little something about its audience, and they presented a pitch that the project use new approaches based information stewardship. New approaches can be a difficult sell to someone who has one chance once to build a building. Even so, it seems to me the Information Stewardship is a good line to take with Librarians.

Information Stewardship appears include keeping all design information on-line and electronically readable. All commissioning information will also be kept on line. Making a statement that speaks to me, the firm also asked that they have access to live operating data for at least a year, to make sure that the building delivers the energy and performance goals that are specified in the design.

This last point is particularly important. One of the worst failings of first generation LEEDS Green Buildings was their long term performance. Platinum building performance was never verified. Innovative designed were never adequately explained to maintenance and operations personnel. At last, that nettlesome vibration is solved putting a brick on the damper. At last, that noise in the duct is blocked by shoving a file cabinet in front of the oversized return. A year after delivery, the performance is poor.

Regular readers will recognize the goals of this project as being similar to those of the National Building Information Model Standard (NBIMS), now known as buildSmart. It is interesting that the design firm professed no awareness of NBIMS, and in particular, no awareness of the Common Operations Building Information Exchange (COBIE) which specifies the hand-off of information from design and construction to operations.

SILS has recently begun offering concentrations in Bioinformatics. There is some discussion about adding a concentration in Business Informatics. Perhaps, with the aid of Building Information Stewardship, we can begin the development of Building Informatics. If so, this could be the missing piece in developing the abstractions needed to develop truly responsive buildings for the transacted energy grid.

Is anyone else as confused as I about the differences between Informatics, Infomatics, and Analytics? They seem to be used interchangeably, but in different conversations. Please post if you can define the distinctions.

Managing the Impulse for Control

Monday’s Wall Street Journal included an article on how technology has reduced the impulse control of top executives. Empowered by cell phones and Blackberries, they can no long control the impulse to reach out and touch their staff. The electronic tether means these executives are always on, unable to go on vacation, to really take time off. This poses two classes of risk. The executive experiences a loss of recovery time and narrowing of interests that hurts his long-effective. The more insidious problem is that his staff and top managers are unable to take responsibility for their jobs. Constant micromanagement enervates most staff and alienates the best. The interference and implied lack of trust was cited as a significant cause of turnover among the hardest to replace staff.

The same issue included an editorial by Dick Armey on the FAA and Air Traffic Control. He recommends closing down large portions of the current system and moving to one based upon a pervasive GPS. He described this process as moving from Flight Control to Air Traffic Management. A significant barrier to progress is the desire of Congress to preserve control and patronage in each and every district. The delays caused by the inability of the current Air Traffic Control to handle the current volume of flights are a significant cause of the frustrations of flying this summer.

In oBIX, if we do our work right, we will significantly reduce the span of control in today’s over-integrated systems. Individual systems and their control systems will be isolated with their own interfaces. To the extent the interfaces become service oriented, they will eliminate central system micromanagement of control, to be replaced with coordination of services. As in business, this will allow the systems with better service agents to flourish. A significant difference is that in building systems, the best agents can be replicated, extending the benefits of their superior performance.

As the GridWise Architectural Council defines the Service Oriented Grid, demand/response and site generation will be additional services proffered to the market by building-based agents. These autonomous agents will negotiate with the site-based system services, in response to the goals of the local enterprises, and with the awareness of live electricity pricing to offer load management services to the grid. These agents will manage the economical production of heightened amenities to the building occupants. This will be far more effective, and far better accepted than is central control of water heaters and building chillers by the grid.

It’s hard to give up control. Giving up control means giving up cherished perquisites of authority and the comfort well-worm processes. Giving up control means establishing objectives and letting others perform. But giving up control means the best and the brightest will work with you. Giving up control means that that your organization will be as intelligent as the sum of your staff, and not just as limited as you are. Giving up controls lets individual agents compete on the most economical provision of the best benefits. Giving up control increases the intelligence of any service, human or machine, as the creativity and skills of all our allowed to compete.

If we could only manage the impulse for control…

XML is not enough to create an Enterprise Interface

On the NBIMS list yesterday, Louis Hecht with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) observed:

XML does not provide semantics. XML does not solve business problems. XML Schemas do not provide semantics or solve business problems. XML, by itself, does not solve interoperability problems, yet it is an important tool for doing so.

And he was exactly right. Bad XML Schemas, and perhaps most first generation XML schemas do not provide semantics. Good XML schemas implement semantics, bad ones do not. For an example, within the Building space, I would argue the GBXML provides semantics. Even oBIX 1.0, frustrating to me, offers semantics, but one limited to points services and therefore not readily accessible to business functions. Establishing base semantics was a critical early goal of that project.

Good XML Schemas are all about semantics, for without semantics there is no interoperability. I would refer to something like UBL (Universal Business Language) as an overarching semantic framework that is being built into numerous schemas at a deep level.

The larger point is true. XML and XML schema do not inherently include semantics - but the good schema do. One of the reasons that I am watching NBIMS so closely from the oBIX vantage point is that the higher semantics will need to be there before oBIX has an enterprise interface. I have a hard time imagining what applying Policy to point services even means. Our next challenge is to figure out how oBIX accepts an ICAL invitation to make the building system "occupant aware".

As Enterprise programmers will never be control engineers, we are going to have to wrap up the standard functions into business services. In oBIX if I define a set of functionalities for a given period of time, it is called a contract. For these to be useful, we will need to pre-define several contracts and make each of them discoverable. Discovery will mean that we need to describe each one in terms of the service it provides. The Description/Catalogue will need to be machine readable rather than human readable, which means it will be based on Semantics.

But whose semantics?

I am hoping we can find a way to map Design Intents / Systems modeled by the energy model / spaces served into Service descriptions. It would make sense, then, to invite the control system's Service to the same meeting. To do that, to make a Service that can be subject to Policy, that can have rational Security applied, that can be Discovered by enterprise applications will require that we have Semantics embedded in the XML of the Service Descriptions.

It is still my plan that as I become more familiar with NBIMS, I will be able to discover the Semantics I need to do this. Somewhere in the check list of Services to be Commissioned, in the Systems in the Energy Model, and even in the Function analyzed by the Code Compliance checker are the Semantics needed to create discoverable abstract services.

And that XML will be an order of magnitude more useful because it is semantically laden.

Got an idea on how we can bring semantics  to building systems XML  - please post a comment...