Some things that should be Easy (but aren’t yet)

I get a lot of correspondence indicating that we now have enterprise ready interfaces. Pshaw. We have a lot of control protocols that are serialized to look something like well crafted XML.

We have a lot of points exposed, without any means for the non-engineer to evaluate what they might mean. These points suffer because they lack what Bob Smith of Tall Trees is teaching me to call an upper ontology. Without the fancy words, we have access to a lot of numbers that don’t mean anything.

What follows is a list of some things that should be easy to do. They should be doable by a non-specialist. Exposing the ability to wire these things together should not involve exposing or interfering with the inner workings of each system.

• A tenant entering a lobby door after hours uses a card reader or keypad to gain access. Simultaneously, the HVAC starts and lighting turns on in the tenant's space so the tenant is safe and comfortable when entering their space. The building manager receives the necessary information to bill the tenant for use of the environmental systems from the time they walk in the door until they later leave the building.
• A new employee is enrolled by human resources and a photo badge is printed. Simultaneously, that badge is activated as a credential in the access control system and parameters for when and where they can go are downloaded into controllers and readers.
• An "after hours" security console provides graphical information of alarms for security and HVAC for emergency response at a multi-building office campus.
• Dorm residents leave for the summer. Their card credentials are disabled - but not deleted - until they re-enroll for the fall semester. Student Housing, Administration, and Security all save many keystrokes.
• The provosts office sets up class schedules and space assignments and the building automation systems automatically schedule the appropriate spaces for occupancy
• A building occupant who operates very energy-intensive equipment can access real-time energy use and pricing data to take advantage of time-of-day energy rates when running major pieces of equipment
• An administrative assistant in a conference facility can have a desktop application the enables room scheduling and set-point control for the entire conference facility without any interaction with Building Automation System staff
• A professor in the School of Business or in Information Science can assign undergraduate research that easily makes use of near real-time data from energy producing and consuming equipment to develop business models based on building analytics.
• A High School theatre department can disable a smoke alarm for the duration of a play, confident that the safety systems will re-enable themselves without expensive and hard-to-schedule involvement of a controls company.
• Tenants can directly monitor QOS agreements in provision of services
• Landlords can directly monitor QOS of outsourced utility services such as steam and chilled water.
• Special needs areas within Universities and Biomedical research companies can meet regulatory needs for direct monitoring of key areas (animal care facilities, pharmaceutical storage) gaining instant access to temperature, humidity, and air-turnover rates, information that is today available only within the Building Automation System control silo
• Students wish to be able to manage their own environmental footprint, and see their own net energy use in sustainable dorms, as well as having dorm-to-dorm comparisons during the annual Green Games.
• A doctor’s office is able to integrate the environmental controls of its examination rooms with the schedules for patients into those rooms, enabling the practice to improve patient comfort (warmer rooms when a patient is undressed) while saving money over all (less conditioning when the room is vacant).

The question is, why are any of these things difficult, and why do they require the work of buildign operations staff or an engineer?

Building Systems as Economic Actors

Building system controllers are getting more like the VTEC engine of my car. Whenever I get a tune-up, my car runs rough for a couple days. The controller figures out what has changed, adjusts to things, and once again runs optimally. In the same way, building systems becoming self managing. Controllers from well known brands now tune their systems in the same way.

The next step is a wider awareness. Package systems are just beginning to track humidity and temperature, inside and out, build a knowledge of how long it takes to reach a new state. As we extend AMI (Automatic Metering Infrastructure) to the system, energy use to achieve or maintain each state will become part of the mix. Shortly after installation, system controllers will be understand their actual energy needs. After one year, and a pass through the seasons, this database will extensive.

When a Demand/Response (DR) event comes from the grid, each such system will know what energy it can cut with what consequences. A front end agent, negotiating with sub-systems using higher order (abstract) messages such as the BACnet Load Control object, will be able to assess the energy available for each behavior, compare it with the price offered by the utility, and decide whether to participate.

To take full advantage of the forward pricing under look-ahead DR, price awareness will need to move into the lower level systems as well. DR for load shaving is short term: I need you to shed power in the next 15 minutes. The more effective DR for load shaping delivers market prices for the day ahead.

Ventilation for building spaces today is dumb. This conference room holds 24 people, so always provide ventilation for 24 people. Existing business models schedule a meeting by inviting people and a room to the same meeting. There are systems that can adjust for occupancy already. What few of them have is a standards based way to communicate occupancy. If the room forwards this invitation to its systems, then the room can prepare for the seven actual attendees at this meeting.

With price awareness, the room can decide when to get ready. Is it better to prepare for the 9:00 meeting starting at 8:00? If energy is cheaper at 6:00 AM, perhaps cooling earlier and holding the room ready is the right decision today. The second option will certainly use slightly more energy. More importantly, it will push energy use from a time of relative scarcity to relative abundance. That movement, known as load shaping, will improve energy use across the bigger system. If the utilities price correctly, the cheapest solution is the better one for society and the environment.

Data Centers aren’t anything special.

Normal business now need to defend themselves from the power systems just as data centers do.

Long time readers know that I consider that power companies and utilities commissions over-estimate power reliability by focusing on the presence of power and not on the quality of power. I often note that my home, halfway between a major research university and a nuclear plant suffers multiple outages a month, outages long enough to require that I reset all the devices in the house, whether microwave, DVD player, or alarm clock. This probably has something to do with the frequency with which I must replace home electronics. Yet homes are “adequately supplied” with power.

On the other side is the data center. Data centers have long acknowledged that utility power is neither good enough nor reliable enough for their purposes. Data centers use multiple strategies for on-site energy storage, on-site energy generation, and on-site energy conditioning to protect themselves from the product supplied over the power grid.

Non high-tech businesses are considered as something more similar to the home than to the data center. They were not worth protecting in the way data centers are protected.

Two weeks ago, some friends open up a bakery and sweet shop in Chapel Hill. Sugarland is an all-natural bakery and gelato shop. Its business equipment is kitchen equipment and retail refrigeration. It seemed the worst problem they were going to have was keeping up with the swarms of students that found them as soon as they opened, before their staff was all trained. Doc and Katrina were exhausted, but pleased. The snacks were delicious. Rush hour warm cookie time was a success.

Last Sunday a wind storm came through the southeast. In town power would flicker, then flicker again. One would think that this business would be mostly unaffected, not much different from the businesses the grid was designed for in the 1950’s.

Modern ovens, however, have computer systems the run them, computers that reset with each flicker. Modern gelato machines have processors that stop when the power dims a little. The cash register is, of course, a high touch system for inventory control and minimal staff training, until its database corrupts.

I went by Sugarland on Sunday as Katrina threw out 250 cupcakes that deflated when the oven re-set. She did not dare start more cakes for the morning until she knew the power would be reliable. Doc had given up on trying getting fresh gelato out to the waiting lines. Neither knew what to prep that night to prepare for the early morning baking on Monday.

The absolute shut-down and loss of business for flickering power in a modern retail bakery is as big a hit as in any data center. Bakers, too, need to defend themselves from what comes over the power line with

Monday’s short stock is now over. The power has been adequate this week. The shelves are stocked again. But I will no longer consider data centers as having special needs; merely needs that are better recognized.

I think I will head downtown now – I hear the grapefruit gelato is superb.

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?