Houses, Papers, and Effects: Updated

This blog writes about control systems, sensors, and the internet of things (IoT). Long-time readers know that I am concerned about privacy, and how the techniques of big data can erode privacy through accumulation of the most insignificant facts. Occasionally, I even slide over into my perception that the Supreme Court Justices all too frequently err because they do not understand technology, and how easy it is to erode the protections our Constitution grants us.

In pre-revolutionary times, officers of the crown used writs of assistance to justify widespread searches of people and their possessions. The business documents and correspondence would frequently be confiscated and or destroyed. This violated the rights of Englishmen, long established, to be secure in their homes from even the King’s men, unless there was a warrant served, based upon testimony made under oath. This violation of long-standing law was a significant factor in convincing many that a break with England was necessary.

In the 18th century, people kept their most significant documents in their desk at home. If they wanted to transport their papers or to conduct business, they would bring their papers, often in a locked box. There was no easy way to make copies of these documents; if they were lost they were irreplaceable. There was no general right recognized which permitted government agents to check the contents of these papers. In the Declaration of Independence, the then colonists chastised their government for “for abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies”

The Bill of Rights codifies things that governments must not do to its citizens, no matter their motive. The 4^th amendment codifies the handling of personal and business documents.

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Even mail, sorted, handled, and delivered by a government agency, the post office, could not be searched while in transit without specific warrant.

Today, we store our documents in the cloud. If we don’t store them there, we back them up to the cloud. Our correspondence goes through Gmail. We share documents with partners using DropBox. Every persona and professional document we have is stored on a computer somewhere, and usually off-site.

Because the Justices have not understood technology, they have treated this information as if it were transactional documents belonging to the company that holds it. Electronic documents held in the clouds by a third party today receive almost no protection. These documents are indistinguishable from the private correspondence and papers of colonial times. They are no more novel than papers typed out with a typewriter were different from those hand-copied in prior times.

There are several proposed laws in congress that would assign to these electronic documents the same protections as are held by paper documents. In essence, these laws would declare that our electronic backups, our email, and our cloud shared storage are exactly the type of papers and effects described in the fourth amendment.

A petition as whitehouse.gov asks the executive branch to support these laws.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/reform-ecpa-tell-government-get-warrant/nq258dxk

Please, go to whitehouse.gov and sign the petition.

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.

There has been considerable effort in the last few years to standardize the information hand-off between a Big BIM project and the ongoing maintenance and operations of a building. Conceived of by Bill Brodt at NASA and Bill East at the ACE Engineering Research and Development Center (ERDC), The Construction [to] Operations Building Information Exchange (COBIE) defines the data that needs to be exchanged. Most of today’s Maintenance Management Software (CMMS) is able to import a COBIE data set.

Part of Bill Brodt’s original vision was that COBIE can be described as the spreadsheets you would make yourself as you went around and commissioned a building. Each piece of equipment could be catalogued whether or not there was a BIM available from construction. The information from those spreadsheets could be brought into a CMMS just as is information originating in Big BIM.

Unfortunately, this notion of spreadsheet harmed the perception of COBie. Because Excel spreadsheets use an internal XML format, an Excel spreadsheet with multiple tabs was declared to be *the* XML standard for COBIE. COBIE produced in spreadsheets rarely had the cross-linking and validation envisioned by the creators of COBIE. Many programmers received COBIE in Excel form, and wrote off the specification as unworkable.

Last year, the ERDC addressed this issue by formally defining XML schemas (XSD) and a strong semantic typing for COBIE, This specification has the misleading name COBIE Lite. COBIE Lite makes COBIE information much more valuable, as it makes COBIE informational more useful as a general purpose exchange format for building operation. It is now possible to automate checking if a COBIE information set is valid and coherent. (Some more jargon: the formal semantics and validity checking for COBie are formally specified using the OASIS Content Assembly mechanism, hereafter referred to as CAM.)

Now I must circle back. The BIM process long ago defined SPie, the system properties information exchange. SPie was developed so that designers using BIM could compare products and place information about the selected product directly into Big BIM. SPie defines the format for providing faceplate information for any system in a building. SPie also defines the physical dimensions of equipment. A full SPie set includes spare parts and recommended maintenance for a piece of equipment.

Good commissioning discovers and reports most of the information in SPie. If you consider the COBie spreadsheets, then a single SPie record would create a row on the equipment inventory, and several rows on the recommended spare parts tab, and several rows on the recommended maintenance tab. I suspect that the ERDC will soon apply the CAM used to create to define an XML format for SPie.

Small, well-defined information exchanges are at the heart of just-in-time data exchanges. It is not a big leap to imagine manufacturers providing an URL for each make and model of equipment. Systems that need this information could request this XML document when needed. And that at last gets me around to Tiny BIM.

A growing number of owners of large buildings and campuses are putting machine readable tags onto equipment. An early use was a bar code that would be scanned to verify that the mechanic was actually there. RFID tags are sometimes used, especially when they were used as part of construction. As smart phones become standard equipment, more and more organizations are using QI Codes.

QI codes are best known for their use in magazine ads—“Scan here for more information.” Although there is no requirement, QI codes are generally used in ways that assume connectivity—go here on the web and get this document In maintenance Apps, the QI code verifies which piece of equipment is being worked on. Inside an app the QI code may call up the supporting information such as previous work on this equipment.

In the future, manufacturers may tag their equipment with a QI code that points back to the SPie record. Local software could read the SPie information and deliver key information right to the technician. Updates a,d service alerts could be readily available, in the field, even in an non-commissioned building. Commissioning a building without BIM would become, in part, find the QI code and scan it.

Tiny BIM puts needed information into the hands of those who needed it right away, with little training or up-front costs. Tiny BIM creates a space for whole new classes of maintenance applications. Tiny BIM increases the value of existing energy analytics apps. Tiny BIM can stand alone, or as an adjunct to Big BIM, using ongoing maintenance to improve the BIM maintained in the CMMS.

I think Tiny BIM is coming soon.

Finding a Needle in the Internet of Things (part 1)

Things cost what they cost to install. Ongoing charges are, in the short term, fixed. Value may be the only thing you can control. In the Internet of Things, value will be determined by how many ways you can use that Thing. Value will be determined by how many different uses can use that thing. Some of those users will be other things.

Things (as in the Internet Of…) tend to be commodities. One thing is inherently like another. Once I have more than a small number of things, I need a way to distinguish between sensors, between pieces of building equipment, and even to distinguish between tangible services such as catering and transport services. One of the first places that all of us have seen things on the internet is in conference rooms, vehicles, and tools as they are scheduled within enterprise scheduling systems.

Discovery is essential to agile integration. If systems can discover each other, we do not need to map them. If systems can understand what they discover, they can integrate themselves. One of the requirements is common semantics, that is agreements as to how something is described (or describes itself). This post is about directory directory services for the internet of things.

In Calendars, people are identified by vCards. VCards are deeply embedded in CalDav, stil the most common protocol for writing new Calendar Apps and user interfaces. Many email systems support attaching your vCard to each outgoing message. VCards are electronic business cards, and just as in traditional business cards, different people choose to include different information on them. Also like paper business cards, various companies and organizations have developed their information and format standards for vCards.

After email, the most common place to find a vCard is in a directory. There is a deep historic link between the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and the vCard. LDAP is used to manage security as well as directory services in the biggest organizations. The link between directories and security is as natural as is role-based security. LDAP records include have the same variability as does the vCard standard. At some level, though, LDAP is the thing you use to get a vCard.

LDAP supports diversity of information returned, including security on particular aspects of the information. Over time, a varied set of what I will call here, for brevity, vCard profiles have been developed. These often have object-type characteristics. For example, the inetOrgPerson (RFC2798) is defined as a standard set of extensions to the organizationalPerson as defined in the ITU standard X.521. Many colleges and universities have collaborated to define the eduPerson to handle students, grad students, and faculty.

In LDAP, there is a long history returning different information about the same object in different security contexts. At universities, an LDAP will return different information when asked about a student or about staff, even when the target is the same person. Just as in medical information, the portions of student information that can be exposed to query vary widely by querier and context, and are controlled by federal privacy law. There are many security contexts, including when domestic relations go wrong, under which access to some attributes of a particular directory entry is limited. LDAP also supports multi-valued attributes easily. This is in sharp contrast with the normal expectations from, say, a SQL query.

In calendars, things that are not people are designated as Resources. Improvements to Resource vCards is a long-standing project of CalConnect. Some Resources may have a schedule, but not be schedulable. This usually means that it is scheduled by someone else using means you do not have access to, but to the user, it is not schedulable even so. Schedulable Resources may use vAvailability to indicate when and how they can be scheduled. It is of course possible, even probable, that different entities will receive a different vAvailability from the same Resource.

It will come as no surprise to my readers that I now come around to building-based resources. These are most frequently public rooms and building systems. Public rooms are invited to meetings as are other attendees. Smart buildings can optimize energy use while preserving amenity if they know when and by whom the building will be used. In a related post, I will describe how vCards for building-based resources will be standardized.

A key consumer of secure directory services for systems will be other systems. With discovery and directory services, they can find each other to interact. Through developing calendar standards, including vAvailability, they will learn when they can interact.

Secure discovery, self-integration, and autonomous assembly will be part of how we maximize the value of the internet of things.

Privacy, Self Defense, and Smart Energy

I spent some time last week down a country road, watching the local power. I watched three phases that were greatly out of balance. I observed trapezoidal wave forms. We could see the home appliances of everyone else on the road, as they each turned on and off.

Together, we watched the power coming into his lab. They were his neighbors, and he knew them from observation. He could relate when they changed their appliances, and how they lived their lives. He could tell from the patterns how they affected the shared local electric distribution circuit. There were some especially odd patterns, second level harmonics that caused some unusual recurring spikes. It wouldn’t be hard, simple machine learning, really, to learn these special patterns for some types of equipment, and then to search for them.

This is all so much easier than it was even a couple years ago. Affordable gigahertz sampling is no longer cost prohibitive. Industrial espionage can be done from across the street. Soon private detectives will be able to read the activities in houses from down the street, using only a power connection, pattern matching against an on-line database, and a little creativity. Your house and business is now an open book, with or without the participation of utilities.

This technology was not built to look out, however. Monitoring and analyzing the distribution feed is a mere side effect of the system I was checking out. The purpose of these systems is not to spy on the distribution system, but to defend against the distribution system. What we could see on the samples is also felt by the building.

The purpose of this monitoring is to fix the power inside. Each phase of power is simultaneous corrected to near ideal wave forms. The effects inside the building are extraordinary. When supplied with an ideal power wave, electric motors become audibly quieter. While that alone makes an industrial space pleasanter, it reflects an underlying reduction in vibration and in generated heat. At the same time, the motor begins to operate at its faceplate output.

This is what I mean by defense against the distribution system. Excess vibration, and the associated noise and heat, are caused by the noise on the electrical supply, by wave forms that are less than the ideal. Traditional power conditioning systems often create trapezoidal or triangular wave forms—they may protect from spikes and sags, while they increase wear and tear. It’s too early to predict how much ideal power forms will extend the life of equipment, but reduced noise and reduced heat are strong benefits on their own.

While one can hear the change in motor operation, florescent lights and digital equipment benefit as well. Long time readers of this blog know that my house is beset by something that causes even my incandescent lights to fail in clusters. Having watched the power on this nearby local distribution loop, it seems likely that I have seen the answer, even while all parameters are “within spec for home distribution.”

The plan of course, is for the local distribution to get worse. While we watched, we saw changes to power on the entire loop when the charging of a single neighbor’s electric vehicle began. Even the best solar panel installations affect these wave forms, and most installations are far from the best. The effects not only damage neighbor’s equipment, but they may increase metered power use for those neighbors as well.

Defense from the grid, especially from the smart grid is an important new market. Distributed energy resources are in all our future, and they make such defense more important.

An allied outcome of this defense is that the view from the outside is obscured. The systems behind the power controller cannot be inspected as we inspected the neighbors. Unbalanced power use, that is, power unevenly spread across the three power phases is balanced on the outside of the controller. Power factor is optimized. This ideal power load reduces metered power, often substantially. The operation of individual motors and digital systems looks from the supply-side as a single ideal consumer. Energy-use privacy is protected and restored.

As consumers, we don’t yet know how to think about and use this kind of product. As smart energy, distributed energy resources, and electric vehicles become more widely deployed, we will want to learn.