Angered and motivated by my experience preparing a large state university for Y2K, I made my public entrance to the public building systems space in 2002. Y2K was a crisis when it was anticipated that any program that used a two-digit year in the date (as in 99, and it was all of them) would fail after the year 2000 (when the year might be 01). State universities build using low bidders in accord with state construction law, and the University of North Carolina had accumulated a hodge-podge of systems for building operations, steam distribution, chill water distribution, cogeneration, and electricity purchases that barely interoperated. Worse still, the interoperations were fragile, and upgrading any one system would break the connections with any number of other systems. I simply wanted stable inter-system connections that did not break with any minor change to either system.
Read MoreStandards
Bidding for Schedules—VPOLL and VAVAILABILITY
Last week I watched live multi-vendor demonstrations using the new specifications vPoll and vAvailability. These extend calendar interactions to support live negotiations about schedule and performance. These negotiations can be machine-to-machine (M2M) or augmented by human input. These were not applications, these were live interactions between mainstream calendar servers. The testing used simple user interfaces, just enough to operate the tests. These simple information exchanges extend existing systems for schedule negotiations into automated polling and bidding.
Tiny BIM Here and Now
The use of Building Information Models (BIM) has transformed the way that buildings are designed and constructed. Those projects that commit fully to their use deliver higher quality buildings at a lower price. Finith Jernigan has written on how using even incomplete or partial BIM can provide worthwhile results, an approach he describes in his well-regarded book “Big BIM, Little BIM.” While traditional of Big BIM requires a strong commitment and organizational change, Little BIM requires a smaller commitment, and can offer an organization just starting to consider the use of BIM advantages in planning, design, and in operations. I am not going to summarize Jernigan here—the book is small enough and valuable enough that you should just ahead and read it. In this post, today, I am going to write about something smaller, and something that can reduce costs and improve efficiency. Today, I am considering Tiny BIM.
Slim BIM: The Middle Ground between Document and Service Part 2
In my last post, introduced Slim BIM and the critical need for shared configuration to speed development in the building systems. This post extends that conversation.
A report from NREL, delivered last Spring, defined the Building Service Interface (BSI), a standard for interacting with building systems from non-building applications. That report recommended that each BSI be able to share a light-weight BIM, i.e., ...