Enterprise Interaction

DER systems in the house and small business

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The purpose of an energy management system (EMS) or building management system (BMS) in a home or commercial is to serve the owner or occupants of the home or building. Only secondarily is its purpose to “serve the grid”—and then only to the extent that it is rewarded for doing so in a way that supports its owners or occupants.

Every system in a house or building is a legacy system from the moment it is installed (manufactured, actually). No matter what standard we may posit for future use in home systems and home integration, most systems managed by the EMS or BMS will be...

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Work Plan for oBIX 2.0

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Some of you know that the oBIX Committee (open Building Information Exchange) is meeting again. The work is moving ahead on multiple fronts. We have separated encodings (XML and COAP) from the core specification. We are working on separate transport specifications for SOAP and REST (including JSON). We are doing a refresh of the core specification for consistency and conformance. I am most excited, however about the oBIX 2.0, the enterprise services.

The core specification (1.x) requires each oBIX server to provide a lobby. Clients can ask the server what is in the lobby, and thereby discover how to interact with the system behind that server. Contracts are special purpose agreements...

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Smart Energy in Industry: Introducing MRP4

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Last week, I spoke at the Department of Energy’s Industry to Grid (I2G) Summit, a pre-meeting of the ARC World Industrial Forum. For me, it felt like something of a homecoming. Several careers ago, my biggest customers were manufacturers. In the late 70’s, popular imagination held US manufacturing to be dead, poorly managed and low quality. In a famous Newsweek article, a celebrity athlete boasted of a summer in the UAW, during which he deliberately added rattles to pass the time. As often happens, a renaissance had begun some years before public perception hit bottom.

As a young programmer, I was working with companies trying to improve quality while...

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BSI Part 3: The Metadata Problem

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Metadata refers to information about data. While control systems for buildings can offer up an impressive amount of data, it takes far too much effort to figure out what it means. In a medium-sized commercial building, tens of thousands of points can take a month to unravel before useful integration with the businesses and lives of the people who occupy those buildings is possible. Throughout all the integrator must...

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