Give me a Compliant Agent

Compliance is one of the new critical services that intelligent systems can offer buildings and their owners. Compliance is performance plus documentation. Compliance adds value to any process. Compliance can convert a process into a service. Compliance is what lets you know what it is that you have.

Traditionally, compliance is the concern of those with legal requirements. Pharmaceutical manufacture needs to be performed within environmental conditions defined during their approval process. Animal quarters must be maintained in accord with defined best practices. Clinical spaces must be maintained in accord with licensing requirements. Pharmacies must maintain conditions that keep their delicate supplies active.

Compliance also preserves and improves value. Recently, landlords have found that tenants will pay more if buildings are green, but only if the owner can prove it. Energy saving reductions can reduce building healthfulness—monitoring compliance with such standards as those developed by the Healthy Building Institute will prove that health is not being sacrificed to efficiency. Sooner rather than later, tenants will demand and reward provable quality of service (QOS) measurements.

Unfortunately, compliance for building systems tends to be bolted on rather than recognized as an original requirement. Bolted on solutions are not very good. Customer expectations for this market are low. Market expectations are low. There are no common definitions to grow/validate this market.

We need to define a common framework for validation of environmental spaces, define a compliance information exchange as a buildingSmart Information Delivery Model (IDM). IDMs are how information standards fit into buildingSmart. Defined IDMs for compliance will enable designers to incorporate compliance needs into buildings plans at an earlier stage.

Pharmaceutical manufacturing environments, animal research facilities, medicine storage areas in pharmacies, and data centers (to grab a wide handful) all may wish a common data payload. Let’s say that, for the sake of argument, that the requirement of all these what I would call “regulated environment spaces” is Provide a narrow temperature with a tolerance of T’, a humidity of H with a maximum variance of H’, and the ability to document same for compliance checking at an interval not to exceed M minutes. Animal Quarters might need a Ventilation number as well. To add in microelectronics/virus research, we might need Pressure standards.

The IDM becomes a standards-based way to deliver compliance information to the enterprise. The IDM also becomes the basis for specifying the systems that you are revealing, defining standards for autonomous commissioning of the regulated environment space. The same IDM also then become the basis for specification and energy modeling.

Interoperate or Fade Away

Control systems have been complacent, ignoring real enterprise standards, accepting poor interfaces with not very useful WSDL. They do this, because they can. Control system vendors just assume that the old ways will go on forever, that they can sprinkle a little XML on their control streams, and declare they have an enterprise interface,

Well not any more. Two players who may not understand the underlying systems, but who do understand enterprise interfaces have entered the market.

First, a an old conference acquaintance of mine sent me the following link from Microsoft. Microsoft Research has what is essentially a science fair each year. The following is a link from this year’s MR fair, and a development called Tine Web Services.

We will demonstrate a low-power, low-cost Web-service implementation for devices that must run on batteries for several years, such as smoke detectors and window-break sensors. In particular, we will show a prototype system of WSDL/TCP/IP over a low data rate 802.15.4 radio used in home automation. The Web-service interface makes it easy for multiple programmers to develop home-control applications using devices manufactured by different OEMs without learning new programming technologies. Our system also provides a uniform setup experience for users, enabling them to integrate multiple home devices into a single network. We also will demonstrate how a home network can be connected safely to the Internet to be accessed from cloud services. We will present a feedback-based, multiradio scheduling algorithm for energy-efficient communication among battery-operated devices. Finally, we will demonstrate an energy-management application that saves energy by actively monitoring weather and energy price variations using cloud services without compromising user comfort. This example application can be used to connect the 166 million U.S. homes and several million more worldwide to the Microsoft cloud for providing energy management. This application can generate a steady revenue stream for Live services that does not depend on user clicks. It also reduces our carbon footprint and leads to a greener lifestyle.

See the video here: http://research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/techfest/videos/video_e.aspx

The price point is not where it needs to be, but it is not production either.

In other news, I heard rumors today about a CISCO initiative to bind WS-Reliable messaging built around lightweight EBXML to the building system. I have no real information on this initiative yet, but it does sound like writing a generic Android program for this interface would be a breeze.

So the game is engaged. Control systems vendors can actually begin to offer common informational interfaces, and compete around performance and service, or they can compete with the Thais for the market left after the Chinese are done. It should be an interesting five years.

Informational Interoperability

Power grid reliability, human heat pumps, and data centers as energy resources – what is the common thread? All of these rely on being to get above the details of the systems to see interrelationships between the systems. This approach requires systems to compete on delivering of service, rather than focusing on process. Systems that provide a similar service, albeit with fundamentally different internal processes, must be swappable.

We must move beyond protocol interoperability to informational interoperability.

In engineered systems, interoperability usually means “we can get some signal of some kind between systems”. That signal is data oriented, meaning it is a raw fact that is neither actionable nor useful on its own. Someone with deep domain knowledge program the interactions around those facts. This leads to over-integration between systems.

Informational interoperability raises the bar, by allowing systems to compete on performance and service. Data is not information; often too much data can hide information. Only when facts from the underlying process are assembled into patterns that have meaning and can influence action does data rise to the level of information.

If you have two or more systems that can both consume and produce the same information interface, then those systems are informationally interoperable. If several external systems share the same informational interface to the local system while performing different services, then the local systems interface is reusable.

If I am performing an energy intensive task such as intake reheating, it matters little if my heat source is electric coils, a central steam plant, a solar thermal collector, or the data center downstairs. Each has a cost (which may even be negative), each has a quality, and each has performance characteristics. Systems with informational interfaces can select or which thermal source to use, either at design time or on the fly. Such systems would not need to know any details about the internal operations of their design source.

The best system interactions are built using reusable informational interfaces. The most accepted and best understood reusable informational interface is money. Money provides actionable information about scarcity and value. Monetary interfaces are highly re-useable and interoperable.

Bad systems hide information about performance, scarcity, and value; good systems expose such information in ways that allow innovators to take advantage of this information. Let the systems use whatever low-level protocols they want internally. On the outside, we need information interoperability.