BIM, Services, and Emergency Response

The Building Information Model (BIM) comprises a family of standards, including the three dimensional building model, that compose a comprehensive description of a building. It is an oft hoped desire that the BIM, perhaps working through a mythical BIM server, be accessible to improve situational awareness by emergency first responders

One barrier for this BIM/Emergency management information exchanges is that BIM does not, by and large, define real service mapping. Chemicals and supplies may stored by room number. Ventilation may be by zones established long before the room numbering. Missing people may be in their office as per the directory, or in the conference room, which may not be identified in the BIM, elsewhere.

BIM could rather easily bridge the control system, with its focus on AHU3 by placing AHU3 in the building. If, say a return air temperature sensor is associated with both AHU3 and room 204, then one can imagine standard techniques to visually map rooms, and high heat through the control system.

The biggest issue is control systems tend to present their points for the building engineer, and perhaps one who has an extensive set of blueprints on hand to study. Furthermore, the contractor tends to limit the points displayed in any user interface to ones he is willing to defend. In an example on the UNC campus, we had a decades old building that we had replaced a chilled water valve on repeatedly because it was “frozen open”. When we established direct reading of the underlying control points, we found that a sensor that had never functioned was consistently claiming thousand degree temperatures. The contractor had simply excluded it from the user interface. (The valve is no longer “freezing”.) I wonder what would happen in an emergency scenario, if a point with this sort of reading were suddenly revealed through the emergency BIM.

Managing the diversity of energy generation, storage, and conversion systems in the Zero Energy Building will require interoperable service integration of the underlying systems. My thinking is guided by the service and reliability information of The Green Grid.

/articles/2008/9/25/divvying-up-grid-interoperability.html

These same abstractions would be very useful to the first responder needing to make quick decisions.. Is the primary power still operational? How much ventilation capability remains on the third floor? Is there additional cooling available? How reliable it the substation feeding the building right now?

Recognizing the operational status of these systems will be critical for responder safety in the years ahead. When a building includes on-site generators, electrical storage, and solar panels, it may be hard to simply cut the power to the building. The thermal storage well may be a supply of water to extinguish flames. The potential energy mass storage system (water tank on the top story) might be a source of power, dangerous or useful, a source of incendiary fluids or even mass. The vanadium battery in the basement might be a critical environmental hazard during building collapse.

If we move beyond single building to neighborhood disasters, these Green Grid derived services have new potential benefits. One scenario describes buildings sharing additional information during the period immediately after receiving a CAP alert. A common question might be whether the high school gym is in good enough shape to be a post storm shelter, or field hospital, or… Green-grid style informational standards would clearly improve this assessment. How much operational is cooling (or heating) and how much more is available? How reliable is the power supply? How long will the stored energy in the building last at the current burn rate? Perhaps even how long will the hot water last in the slow recovery hot water tank?

Enterprise Interactions for Physical Security

So, as promised a week ago, here are some scenarios for physical security systems interacting with enterprise systems, and even through the enterprise to other enterprise-enabled buildings systems.

Hotels, Customer Service and Energy.

Hotels put a lot of effort into their customer relationship management. Building space, if well operated, cost the same in similar cities. Beds are beds, as long as they are clean. Hotels compete for customer loyalty to develop preferences that make the consumer check their hotel chain first rather than merely going to hotels.com.

The vision of Hotel Technology Next Generation (htng.org) includes rooms that respond automatically to the customers preferences. These could be warm, cool, or even green with a carbon units saved report printed on the room-check-out.

A proximity chip on the hotel’s room key could allow a guest easy keyless entry to the lobby late at night. The security system could alert the enterprise of the guest’s arrival, and notify the room to prepare the environment the guest likes. Put the same proximity chip on the guest’s frequent customer card, and the front desk could be alerted for expedited check-in. The regular guest could even receive an instant text message on his phone, sending him directly to his room without check-in. The guest’s arrival could notify hospitality services to deliver the guest’s favorite martini or late-night hot chocolate directly to the room within minutes of arrival.

Commercial Maintenance and Federated Identity Management

Commercial building owners face several additional expenses above and beyond repair bills, when a mechanical system needs maintenance. Someone must be tasked to wait around for the repair man. They then let them in to the normally secure areas where the mechanical systems are installed. They may wait around to verify the actual hours on-site by the expensive repair personnel.

With enterprise interaction and federated identity management, the service personnel could gain direct access to the secure areas using their own company badge and their time on site could be tracked automatically.

When the owner and the service organization establish a contract, they would set up the identity federation. The access control system would then refer the security token of the service technician to the service organization for authentication. The authentication process would be the same whether the identity token was merely the badge or biometric data exchanged by the BIAS (Biometric Identity Assurance Services) standard. We now know who the service technician is.

Authorization would involve business processes in both organizations. The owner’s system knows that a service issue exists one the equipment and that the service order has been issued. The service provider knows which technician is assigned to that work order, and can pass the work order back with the authentication. While the work order is open, the technician can be admitted and his comings and goings tracked.

I will add more scenarios soon, including emergency management. Until then, remember that security is not about locking the door; security is about using situation awareness to respond the right way at the right time.

Emergency Response and Building Intelligence

The first responder faces a number of challenges in extracting useful information from a building. Chemicals and supplies may stored by room number. Ventilation may be by zones established long before the room numbering. Missing people may be in their office as per the directory, or in the conference room, which may not be identified in the BIM, or elsewhere.

BIM (Building Information Models) could rather easily bridge the control system, with its focus on AHU3 by placing AHU3 in the building. If, say a return air temperature sensor is associated with both AHU3 and room 204, then one can imagine standard techniques to visually map rooms, and high heat through the control system.

The biggest issue is control systems tend to present their points for the building engineer, and perhaps one who has an extensive set of blueprints on hand to study. Furthermore the contractor tends to limit the points displayed in any user interface to ones he is willing to defend. In an example on the UNC campus, we had a decades old building that we had replaced a chilled water valve on repeatedly because it was “frozen open”. When we established direct reading of the underlying control points, we found that a sensor that had never functioned was consistently claiming thousand degree temperatures. The contractor had simply excluded it from the user interface. (The valve is no longer “freezing”.) I wonder what would happen in an emergency scenario, if a point with this sort of reading were suddenly revealed through the emergency BIM.

Managing the diversity of energy generation, storage, and conversion systems in the Zero Energy Building will require interoperable service integration of the underlying systems. My thinking is guided by the service and reliability information of The Green Grid.

http://www.newdaedalus.com/articles/2008/9/25/divvying-up-grid-interoperability.html

These same abstractions would be very useful to the first responder needing to make quick decisions.. Is the primary power still operational? How much ventilation capability remains on the third floor? Is there additional cooling available? How reliable it the substation feeding the building right now?

Recognizing the operational status of these systems will be critical for responder safety in the years ahead. When a building includes on-site generators, electrical storage, and solar panels, it may be hard to simply cut the power to the building. The thermal storage well may be a supply of water to extinguish flames. The potential energy mass storage system (water tank on the top story) might be a source of power, dangerous or useful, a source of incendiary fluids or even mass. The vanadium battery in the basement might be a critical environmental hazard during building collapse.

If we move beyond single building to neighborhood disasters, these Green Grid derived services have whole new potential benefits. One scenario describes buildings sharing additional information during the period immediately after receiving a CAP alert. A common question might be whether the high school gym is in good enough shape to be a post storm shelter, or field hospital, or… Green-grid style informational standards would clearly improve this assessment. How much operational is cooling (or heating) and how much more is available? How reliable is the power supply? How long will the stored energy in the building last at the current burn rate? Perhaps even how long will the hot water last in the slow recovery hot water tank?

Service Oriented Physical Security

Enterprise and government security are now deeply enmeshed in service oriented architectures. Policy-based event management increasingly drives access to data and access to information. Complex problems of who is granted what kind of access are resolved in conversations in which practitioners assert semantics and compare ontologies.

Members of the Security Industry Association (http://www.siaonline.org/) are in a complicated world with few standards. The big three services (access control, intrusion detection, closed circuit monitoring) share almost noting in control protocols or in implementation. The special needs of diverse facilities, whether highly hardened, or adverse environment (high radiation, extreme cold …) are likely to prevent technology consolidation. Because security must always be concerned with hostile agents, security systems are arguably an area where standardization is actually bad.

The best security systems interact with the enterprise. The trivial example is awareness that an employee was fired yesterday. Closing the office during the company picnic can change both the access control and intrusion detection rules in the building. But enterprise programmers do not really understand the inner working of these systems and their volatile technology.

Security is never about just locking the gate. It is far easier and cheaper to build a fence with no gate, if the goal is to make sure that no one enters. The point of security is to make sure that right person at the right time can easily access a facility or service. Therefore, the most important attribute of security is situation awareness.

Physical security faces the same key issues as system security. Identification is the first question: who is attempting the activity in question. One of the most important identities is the well known person Anonymous. The next question what roles does this person possess. What job does this person have? What role is he assuming today? Is he working on this week’s maintenance call-back list?

Intrusion detection has the same issues. Intrusion detection is also able to add spatial awareness to the enterprise security system. This week, I was introduced to a security system in which a user’s phone and network access were disabled as long as he was in a certain location.

Clean simple enterprise interfaces to security systems should treat the entire systems as an enterprise appliance, offering up situational awareness and providing simple services. Those services can then be made subject to all of the nuances of policy-based security used in the IT realm.