Service Performance and Compliance

So what are the essential components for Building Service Performance framework? What things would you want the building designer to be able to specify early in a project, without selecting a supplier, or a vendor, or a technology?

Some of you may recall an earlier post describing the business services provided by environmental conditioning systems in a big-box pharmacy. The first service was “Ahh, I’m here”. This highly variable service makes the customer glad they have arrived. The second service is a highly regulated environment for storing and dispensing labile pharmaceuticals. This service is less variable and this type of service may be tightly associated with detailed reporting and requirements. The third service, defined for the storage areas, was “Don’t melt the chocolate”. The effectiveness of this service can only be judged by information from inventory and sales systems.

Each Building Service must be defined in terms of Business Values, not in terms of processes or components. No retail business manager ever started the day thinking “I hope I can buy some air conditioning and compressors today”. Each business service implies a compliance metric. Compliance metrics define how quality of Service (QOS) is measured. Compliance metrics may be delivered and documented by building systems or by their effects on other business processes.

A business may have its own building service definitions. IT-savvy businesses often define their unique value proposition through a proprietary service definition. Even these unique service offerings should fit within the framework as a variant of one service or a combination of several.

The compliance portion of the framework defines how we get performance information about each service. The elements of compliance define the actual deliverables. We may be able to derive some aspects of compliance definition from the emerging Business Quality of Service (BQOS) web services standard. Compliance is the only rational basis for business decision making about system selection and performance.

Service and compliance may span several systems. For example, occupancy sensors for lighting systems can provide compliance information for the security service of intruder detection. Under a common Building Service Performance framework, compliance reporting for that service has identical requirements. The lighting system, though, may have other compliance requirements to support the other services it supports.

Why is this important?

Perhaps the most critical factor in improving building design and construction is making important decisions earlier and expressing those decisions in terms that allow the owner to be the informed decision-maker in control of the project. The owner cannot be in charge of a project when the questions are expressed in terms of equipment and processes that the owner does not understand.

Real energy modeling during design requires more than understand building mass and envelope, it requires understanding how the space is to be used and how many will occupy it. A developed Building Service Performance framework will enable design processes that develop real energy models based upon business services, and let the owner choose the compliance level he wants to pay for.

When building designs define compliance requirements up front, then the requirements for building commissioning will be known. This will make processes for automated commissioning possible. Automated commissioning will lead to perpetual autonomous commissioning, a key precursor to self-maintaining facilities.

Please post or email me your ideas on the business services that building systems provide, and what compliance framework each requires.

Equipment Information Exchange: AEX at FIATECH

It’s been a few years since I peeked in at AEX, the developing XML-based data exchange standard for specification and procurement of mechanical equipment. At the time, they were launching a proof of concept project for exchanging pump information, and I was rubbing my eyes to stay awake.

This time, AEX was discussing implementation now. The community has run the test cases. They have proved the concepts. At this meeting, people were discussing how to move into procurement using the AEX standards.

AEX has moved into the open in several ways. AEX now develops its schemas on SourceForge. This is radical stuff for standards groups. All posting and all revisions are placed in an open forum, freely available for anonymous download. Anyone in the world can make and submit revisions.

The pump description interoperability work is more exciting than it sounds. The committee has demonstrated an integrated data flow from the conceptual design through preliminary design to design review by the manufacturers. The manufacturers responded with AEX of their own actual products, including proposed changes to the specification that each of those products would require. During project estimation, engineers could review on a common format all the differences between the request and the proposals. This greatly speeds the purchase of materials and the accuracy of designs while providing information that can be used for maintenance during the lifetime of the project.

Of more interest to regular readers, General Motors has been trying to drive AEX data exchanges into their new plants, with a special focus on HVAC. GM has decided not to wait for vendors to provide AEX-compliant information. GM supplies an applet to its equipment suppliers for new plants and requires that they enter the information. This is wrong in every way but the most important one: it works today with the market conditions we have today.

The power industry was in raucous attendance. We are about to see historic levels of plant building, and the industry would like to see some stands of design and interoperability. The power industry has some very large databases of reliability and operating experience. It sounded like the industry has committed to delivering its metadata (their data structures, not their proprietary information) to the AEX process.

This is very exciting. The benefits of consistent early specification of performance and reliability are far greater than they are for detailed procurement documents. Sustainable design must be service oriented design, and service oriented design begins with performance and reliability. Perhaps we can harvest the AEX performance and reliability to describe the larger systems that are comprised of AEX-specifiable components.

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.

Fitting controls into buildingSmart

I have long wondered how we are going to bring building control systems into the wider world. How are we going to use energy models to instrument actual building performance? How are we going to provide the confusing mass of sensors and actuators as surface that is meaningful to Enterprise systems and functions?

I have long favored buildingSmart as a source of the structure and meaning (or semantics as we call them in dweeb-speak). BuildingSmart is the National Building Information Model Standard (NBIMS) rebranded to be more user friendly and international in scope. Building Information Models (BIMs) are data models to track all information about the design, construction, acquisition, and operation of a building. A good BIM starts with the earliest design intents and continues through the final destruction of the building.

I have long known that the fundamental glue of NBIMS is the IDM. Until today, I had no good idea what an IDM was, or how I might go about constructing one for a control system.

It was clear that fitting building controls into BIM would complete many parts of the model while lending coherence to and standard descriptions to control systems. BIM defines energy models during design, models that are not much use during operations. BIM describes assets and provides a framework for defining the interaction between those assets. This sounds quite close to defining the surfaces used in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Today, Dianne Davis, NBIM IDM Technical Chair from AEC InfoSystems was gracious enough to make things clearer for me. IDM stands for Information Delivery Manual. The IDM is a plain English description of the information exchanges needed between two adjacent systems. In buildingSmart, there is an IDM for the exchange between design intents and massing studies, and between massing studies and structural design, and so on.

An IDM for building systems could be added in to the BIM very early on, perhaps right after massing. “I need 3,000 sf of animal quarters which will considered regulated space. The rules for regulated space are that the temperature, humidity, and ventilation be at a defined level, and that information be tracked and reported at an interval not to exceed a certain time. The regulated space requirements for Animal Quarters must meet standard A, while the regulated space requirements for stogie of labile chemicals (such as drug storage) must meet standard B” This approach defines the performance standard required of systems based upon the programmed use of space at a very early stage.

When expressed like this, IDM standards become significant information for energy models. Both standards above, for animal quarters and for drug storage hare similar in that they may have requirements that temperature and humidity be kept in tight, albeit different, ranges. The animal quarters, however, have quite different ventilation requirements, and thereby a different energy cost.

The same IDM defines the performance standards to be tested during commissioning. It should be straightforward to add this IDM information to the COBIE (Common Operations Building Information Exchange) commissioning information. COBIE is that portion of buildingSmart that defines the handover at the end of construction of building information to operations. COBIE also includes a framework for tying commissioning reports to the underlying systems from the design.

It is easy to imagine that an IDM standard for building systems becomes the basis for bidding and construction as well. It is not hard to imagine that IDMs could be defined for each of the 48 types of systems in the original list of vertical markets compiled at the founding of oBIX, whether Intrusion Detection or Medical Gas Distribution.

Who is willing to help me define IDMs for building systems so controls can find a home in the BIM?