It’s not Use Cases, it’s Interaction Patterns
This morning over coffee I realized that it is because we should be talking service instead of procedure.
One of the truisms of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), is that it is nearly impossible to implement a SOA in a ...
The NIST B2G efforts so far have annoyed me like an itch I cannot quite scratch. The B2G (Building to Grid) group is trying to collect applications and use cases, to create the desiderata for the new interface standards. These are the traditional ways to characterize known systems. Certainly even distinguishing the two can be a strain, although practitioners may prefer one over the other. And yet there is that annoying itch…
This morning over coffee I realized that it is because we should be talking service instead of procedure.
One of the truisms of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), is that it is nearly impossible to implement a SOA in a Procedure Oriented Enterprise (POE). (POA is the "antonym" of SOA, only discovered after SOA existed, in a manner similar to the term Analog Watch only being discovered once we had digital watches). It is easy, relatively, to implement SOA in an organization in which each department and each departmental system knows what its purpose is, and what its effective business metrics are. Such a well understood business can be referred to as the SOE.
A standard SOA talking point is the virtual company assembled entirely from the Services provided by others. Virtual companies are almost inherently SOEs. Many of the new markets I can imagine seem more like virtual companies than they do like the process-oriented companies that make up today’s energy markets. We should be thinking service.
We need to focus on interaction patterns, the approach at the heart of service integration in the e-commerce side of web 2.0. To enable the new markets that most of us hope can arise from these efforts, we need to shift from thinking in terms of request-response and buyer-seller-shipper interaction scenarios. The patterns we must document here go beyond simple bilateral interactions, to include multilateral, competing, atomic, causally related, and routed interactions, and should allow for any number of long-running business processes.
The new smart grid, and the new economies of Zero Net Energy Buildings (ZNE) will involve the discovery of and interaction with services. These service will be involved in energy generation, storage, and conversion. These services will be diverse and multi-party. These interactions will not be procedural.
Now that I have my head on straight, I hope to submit interaction patterns required for new energy markets soon. But I thought I would give everyone a heads up on what I think is the real task.
It’s all too cheap!
Even with today’s rising energy costs, most things do not cost very much. This is a good thing. Food, as a percentage of income, is still at historic lows. In real dollars, gasoline is just where it was at the birth of the modern car in 1908. For most people, switching to a more fuel efficient car will not pay back the initial capital outlay in the next five years. Local energy generation just doesn’t pay back its installation cost quickly enough.
A penny saved may be a penny earned, but today, everyone leaves their pennies by the cash register. Gas prices do not come down because no one wants to make a left turn against traffic to get a better deal. (See also many articles on the front page of Knowledge Problem this week. The New York Times recently indicated that a load in the washing machine might cost $0.53. Who is going to personally manage that? Who is going to miss their $4 coffee on the way to work to reset when the dishwasher runs for this type of gain?
Life cycle does more than lifestyle to determine energy usage. Homes with small children have different energy profiles than empty nesters. Life-cycle trumps life style in energy use except in the most extreme cases. Extreme energy savings are not ever going to be a mass phenomenon. People would rather get to the beach an hour earlier, and get the complaining kids out of the car and in bed on time than they would drive for greater mileage on the trip. These facts are not likely to change.
Well, if we are not going to manage our devices, our systems, and our energy, who will? There are only two answers: someone else and the systems themselves.
Few people want someone else to manage their power, because few people want to relinquish autonomy over their home to someone else. Service is a possibility here. Services like Sensus could remotely monitor my heating and cooling for peak performance, and let me know when and what maintenance is needed. If I approve it, they could even schedule the maintenance themselves, and verify post-repair performance before I pay for it.
This leaves the devices managing themselves. There are a lot of devices, with a lot of features. If we are going to let these devices manage themselves, they need an economic interface, too.
I could ask my dishwasher to run itself, and manage its own budget for the month. I could also set service standards that the dishes always be clean before dinner the next day. This leads to a relatively simple and consistent user interface.
I could tell my solar panel to sell to the grid whenever the price is above a certain amount, and to store any excess energy. The grid might consistently outbid the dishwasher—and that’s OK. If so, the dishwasher would still run only at night.
I could tell my whole-house storage system to buy power at any price until it has four hours on hand. Thereafter it might buy whenever energy is below a target price. I could even let it take bids from the household systems and devices, or from the neighbor. This system would, of course, need to charge an appropriate mark-up based upon its inefficiency of storage.
If we develop the right sort of abstract business interface between the power grid and our buildings, it can also be used between buildings, or within buildings. Most throw-away cell phones have more computing power than it took to go to the moon. Surely, our embedded systems can do a little day trading…
Embbedded commerce heats up
I want to alert my readers that there are two activities afoot right now that have the potential to affect everyone interested in GridWise, particularly those interested in the new e-commerce side of energy.
- NIST has begun working in earnest on the protocols of the new smart grid, in particular the B2B interactions between the grid and its end nodes. Work is split into B2G, I2G, H2G, and T&D, with electric cars placed, for now, in H2G. It is important that they are opting for business to business interactions, and not on machine to machine interactions. Services inside the building would be coordinated by the business processes of the occupants. Grid messages would go to the business agent of the occupants. Interactions, including pricing and bidding, would be between the grid agents and the building agents. This group had its second meeting today, and is requesting submission of applications (use cases but with an economics/business slant) to base the roadmap around.
- OASIS, the e–commerce people, have a stated intent of aligning / cross-pollinating the e-commerce and the device crowds. Clearly, in WS-* (pronounced ws-splat), we have most of what we need to put secure, scalable, abstract, verifiable, transactions around the underlying business transactions of GridWise.
Those who know me, know I am excited about this convergence, which I have been writing about, at here and at other places, for years.
If you have application cases that you would like the business of energy to support, built upon transacted open markets, let me know and I will stir them into the hopper. If you want to be kept notified, let me know that as well.
B2B2B2B
Several precise correspondents disagreed with my characterization of the ideal interface on every energy widget as a single Business to Business B2B economic interface. Some argued for Business 2 Machine (B2M) and some argued for Machine to Machine (M2M). A few argued for P2B (Person to Business). I think they all make it too complex, and limit the opportunity for new business models. B2B is meant to liberate new markets, new market entrants, new trading models.
Starting with today’s Automated Demand-Response (ADR) interfaces, we get more benefits as we move them from M2M to B2B. People want to be in charge of their own property, so a Business inside the building puts the occupant in control. A business inside the building can only express their willingness to participate with an offer or bid. As not all bids are winning bids, the energy supplier outside the building must select a group of offers that clears the market and inform the winning and losing bids. To my eye, that is a B both inside and outside the building.
Remember, the biggest Demand Response on record is when ALCOA furloughed an entire plant for the summer to sell power at high prices to California. Business response always has more options than M2M.
The homeowner, or the homeowner’s agent needs the same opportunities to bid as does the business. The homeowner’s bid may be subsumed into a larger bid, say, a bid by the green neighborhood homeowner’s association. For the utility, a single home, a row of townhouses, or a neighborhood should all have the same external interface. Clearly the neighborhood and the business should have all the same options. This means that the homeowner’s agent, no matter how small, has a business interface on its outside.
Homes may sell power to other homes in the neighborhood. This may be generator power after the storm, or solar power in the afternoon. There may be competition between my neighbor and the big utility for my business. Homes need the same selling interfaces as the larger grid.
I may even have an economic competition inside my home. If I have told my washer not to run, or my car not to charge, until the price is less than a target, that might be a simpler market interface. One source of power for the car or washer may be in-home generation. Perhaps I can charge from that whenever I wish. Or perhaps I am able to sell my local generation back to the grid for higher than the target price, so the washer sits idle.
Perhaps my car batteries and my home batteries have their own rules. Each wants a little bit of storage, say for a 20 mile drive, or to run off-grid for 1 day. Each of them also could charge up for longer. Perhaps the car and the house will bid the price higher when they are below these minima. Perhaps the house will sell stored energy to the car, but only at a premium.
Variable pricing makes economic sense out of local storage. Local storage markets grow naturally. Local storage removes Grid reliability arbitrage tax on unreliable sources. This transfers larger portion of dollars (less fee for T&D) to the unreliable producer...Local storage will grow, but only when it is priced properly.
Eco was in economics before eco was in ecology. We can have a vibrant market ecology at every level of the grid, from the largest scale to the neighborhood microgrid, to inside the house.
New Daedalus
Daedalus designed buildings, automated statues, and built wings for human flight. Daedalus worked by eye and hand, his designs scratched with a stylus on wax tablets. Until recently, we merely perfected his means of work, using better pens, and paper, and finally drawing on computers.
It is only recently that we have begun to leave the methods of Daedalus behind.
Simulations and digital twins guide each decision. Intelligence, or at least behaviors, imbue each system and device. Cyberphysical systems replace household servants and chauffeurs, operate factories, and manage energy logistics. The most pressing concerns are how intelligent systems and buildings will respond to us, and to each other.