Thinking about what I want

Yesterday, the FIATECH focus group met to review the Capital Projects Technology Roadmap. I sat in as representative for the roadmap’s Element 5. Element 5 is titled The Intelligent Self Maintaining Self Repairing Facility. In case you were wondering, last night’s post was a summary of Element 9 from the roadmap. On the way, I stopped in the Frederick, Maryland, IHOP, fueling up and planning what I would say if they asked me what I, or the 5^th Element, required as top priorities.

BIM for Control Systems

No one is using BIM to define control systems. Just as chip design was the last part of electronics fabrication to be computerized, the most technical part of construction is the last to be designed. As the Director of Buildings at UNC once said, “Control systems are designed by a man standing on a bucket.”

BIM for control systems will codify standards for design and develop formal semantics for the services provided by each control system. These system semantics will be linked to the formal performance metrics to measure explicit performance goals. Retro-commissioners know that the problem restoring systems to their original design is that, in many cases, the design does not work. If these systems were fully designed, they would.

Life Cycle Commissioning

Design intents should indicate goals for building performance. When a building model is developed, the energy model should be run directly out of the building model. The energy model should then be compared to the design intents. The energy model, then, becomes a means of commissioning the design against the design intents. The process should be repeated as the design is changed, particularly after value engineering. These energy models then become the basis for traditional commissioning.

The performance goals and metrics developed early in the process are then available to the traditional commissioning agent. The commissioning information should be entered into the building information store to be readily available to service personnel or retro-commissioners.

Since many of the measurements are based upon designed control system metrics, there is no reason not to take those measurements every day – and analyze them as well. Instead of waiting for system components to fail, this would allow regular review of how each system is performing as a system.

Service Oriented Building Systems

One we have the building semantics and building metrics defined during design, then we have the core pieces we need expose control system interfaces as services. No one other than maintenance personnel ever has a reason to issue instructions to a building system except through a service interface. Services hide complex processes and expose only those interactions that are appropriate for the tenant, the landlord, or the enterprise system.

Security definitions of standard roles.

We need standard role definitions to control access to the service oriented building systems. Based upon design intents, the designer can assign particular functions to roles known to the building system. A first pass might be, in order decreasing privilege, Operator, Landlord, Tenant, Visitor, Guest. Maintenance would not be restricted to working through the service interface, and so needs no special role.

Along with roles, we need standards for defining building zones. Zones might be rooms or groups of rooms. They might be determined by cooling system or by security needs.

The job of the building systems integrator then becomes matching control functions and sensor points to zones and assigning internal operations to roles. With identity determined by a third party, the intersection of zones and roles as assigned to each identity provides the basis for secure interoperable building operations.

So that’s my wish list. Too bad I had to leave after one day to go to Grid-Interop…they never got to ask.

Lifecycle Data Management and Information Integration

(This post was prepared during a FIATECH workshop on capital project priorities)

Do you find capital projects seem to ask the same questions again and again. Promises made in programming are lost in delivery. Contractors are unable to guess what the designers wanted. It can be hard to discover if you got what you asked for, and if everything works as promised. Do you wonder if your staff will be able to maintain a new facility in the right way, with the right parts, so you are unsure you will get full value from your investment?

Background:

A 2005 NIST study of the costs of poor interoperability estimated that $16 billion was lost each year in the capital industry.

Vision:

All information associated with the design, construction, and operation of a building is captured and maintained for the life of the asset. Standard interfaces let any authorized person access the information they need using the tool they want. All design information and choices are available to the contractor during construction. During building handover, the commissioning agent compares results to the goals and promises made during design. Maintenance personnel have direct access to all information they need for best results.

Challenges:

The most significant challenges are cultural and organizational rather than technical. Contracts must demand delivery and sharing of all information in existing standard formats. Business processes need to be recast to reflect new responsibilities and liabilities; contract language must be adjusted.

Benefits:

Eliminating the costs of re-creating data and improving operations through appropriate access to information will reduce costs of acquisition and preserve asset value. Common data formats will improve interoperability at every stage of the facility life-cycle, increasing accuracy. Interoperability will increase competition and drive innovation while increasing accountability.

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Pumpkins on the Bridge

I live in an shuttered mill town; the mill closed nearly 40 years ago. Many of the places my children explored while growing up were forbidden relics. They would creep up the rotting stairs of the county’s first cinema, no bigger than many home theatres, to view the still-open projectionist’s log. They would hunt snakes and crawfish under the old general store. They even made excursions into the old mill itself, until it burned sown in a succession of surprisingly large fires. Those fires were probably the dire consequence f misguided environmental policy—of which I may write on another day.

There is another old relic at the heart of town, one that the state and its rational engineers tried to destroy: the old bridge. The old bridge was built in the 20’s, when Bynum was the end of the paved road. A cement roadbed still extrudes from the north end of the bridge up to the second general store where it ends in blacktop.

When 15-501 was paved, it swerved to miss the town, crossing the Haw River just upstream. Some old timers claim they avoided the town so folks could drive from Chapel Hill to Pittsboro without being shot at. That was a lucky break, because it preserved a quiet community and the one lane bridge crossing the river by the old mill.

When the State was planning to make 15-501 a divided highway, they first scheduled the old bridge for destruction. Tear it down, make it bigger, and folks can drive through the town during the highway construction. This, of course, would years later still encourage impatient folk to speed through town to get past a slow school bus on the highway. The free-ranging flash crowds of dogs that characterize Bynum would have been quickly culled. So the unincorporated town protested, eventually successfully

In a fit of petulance, the State next announced that they would tear the old bridge town, cutting the town in two. Not up to standards. One lane bridges are outmoded—you might have to wait on one end for the other driver to cross. Finally, after more protest, the State relented, but still insisted on blocking each end to prevent traffic crossing.

In central Carolina, there is a tradition of placing jack-o-lanterns on country bridges at Halloween. Higher speeds on newer roads have made that dangerous. New designs offer no ledge to place the pumpkins on. But the old Bynum Bridge, with its squared off concrete sides, can still hold and display the giant squash. Now blocked off, a virtual 1/8^th of a mile walking plaza, the old bridge has become Pumpkin Display Gallery for the whole county.

Last night there must have been 80 or so carved vegetables. A few were traditional, albeit better than I ever manage. Others offered radical designs, or were carved with linoleum cutters, and awls, and who knows what to produce translucent cave drawings, and demonologies, and even nature scenes. Some were influenced by Bosch, or Durer, or the rock painting of the Anastasi, or the folk art of the Mexican Day of the Dead. There was even a small can of pumpkin pie filling with a votive candle in front.

Later in the evening, two nameless individuals began drumming at the end of the bridge. There were wearing costumes with a line of glow-sticks sewn down each limb, making a read stick figure, and a blue stick figure that danced, and drummed, in the dark. When their performance was over, they vanished into the dark. Their performance made a fine end to the evening.

It was a triumph of local good will and creativity over the single purpose engineering of the Department of Transportation. Halloween evening was just one other experience of what makes Bynum a special place to live and raise a family.