Schedule & Commissioning and the Future of LEED

As Chair of WS-Calendar, I receive a number of inquiries about the incorporation of time and schedule into other specifications. In particular, the wider visibility of VAVAILABILITY is attracting some interest. Occasionally these include fragments of xml, and inquiries as to how to apply this information.

WS-Calendar recently completed its third public review and will soon be published as Committee Specification 1.0.

NREL has recently released a report recommending tagging standards for building systems. This tagging standard is part of a larger recommendation on proper commissioning standards. The same report (http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy11osti/50073.pdf) posits that a properly commissioned building system interface be able to offer up a light-weight building model, linked to these standard tags. This creates standard semantics for the building system as a minimum commissioning requirement for a future version of LEED.

Continuous commissioning is today limited by a market friction between changing the service provider. Initial set-up costs require analyzing the building system tags, reviewing the [paper] plans, and interpreting the variations between design and as-built drawings. A properly commissioned building should have resolved these issues already in ways that are re-useable by others. There is a growing sense that buildings should continuously update these energy models to maintain LEED certification.

Energy models predict energy use, and building systems are responsible for the energy use in buildings; these systems typically do not change much after commissioning. A changing energy models is caused most often by a change in business practices. Live energy models must be mappable to changing occupant business practices.

Business processes, though, are primarily linked to spaces, not to the systems. Some systems, i.e., food service equipment, may be linked directly to the business process; it may be that even these processes are stated most clearly through space use schedules. In a building with dynamic management of business processes, the energy models may need to be just as dynamic.

My work in communications for smart energy is concerned with communicating the volatility of energy supply and demand with prices. Facilities that understand their energy use will be able to control economic risk through committing advance purchases of energy on a schedule.

Operational scheduling of building systems in BIM promises to refine our understanding of energy use throughout the day. Linking building spaces to building systems will link energy use to business processes. Continuous commissioning makes energy models relevant throughout the life cycle of a building. Smart energy will create new value propositions for those who understand the schedules when they will use energy.

BSI Part 3: The Metadata Problem

After the ASHRAE meetings, and during the AHR conference, several of us are getting together to discuss building system metadata. The goal is to define interfaces to support quick fast integrations of building systems into the wider world. This is the third of several posts describing this interface. Drop me a line or watch for announcements from LONmark if you want to join us for discussion.

Metadata refers to information about data. While control systems for buildings can offer up an impressive amount of data, it takes far too much effort to figure out what it means. In a medium-sized commercial building, tens of thousands of points can take a month to unravel before useful integration with the businesses and lives of the people who occupy those buildings is possible. Throughout all the integrator must understand the technologies in use in that building. At the end, the integrator produces proprietary results himself.

Most of that integration effort is in deciphering what those information points mean. Is that point an internal point, useful only to the HVAC professional, or does it represent a room temperature, or oxygen level, of interest to the building occupants. Do these points describe one air handler or ten? Are all air handlers fed by the same compressor? What space, which means what business services, does each system support? The answers to these questions can be discerned by the trained professional, with the blueprints in one hand, and years of experience in the other. Today, they cannot be reliably determined by machine inspection.

We need a relatively few profiles to pull this off. Or maybe we just need some rules about profiles, and a place to create a repository. Too many profiles could just recreate the chaos we have now, in which metadata is all free-form tags.

There are several existing profiles for communicating with energy meters; we need to get to one. The profile model should be able to indicate what systems are behind it, by reference, to the discoverable catalogue of building systems and spaces. Whether you call it live load, or plug load, circuits and the space they support can be described in PLIie. Everything, of course, should be tied down to the space or spaces it supports.

BIM standards contain standard descriptions for how a space is used. The links to space, offer potential keys into business directories and business schedules.

The place to start collecting this metadata is during commissioning. COBie (Common Operations Building information exchange) defines a family of information models that can be handed over from a construction Building Information Model (BIM). These include a catalogue of building systems and the spaces they support. As retro-commissioning starts to follow commissioning standards, we would begin to get the benefits of the BSI-enabling metadata in existing buildings.

BSI Part 1: What is the Building System Interface?

After the ASHRAE meetings, and during the AHR conference, several of us are getting together to discuss building system metadata. The goal is to define interfaces to support quick fast integrations of building systems into the wider world. This is the first of several posts describing this interface. Drop me a line or watch for announcements from LONmark if you want to join us for discussion.

In my smart grid work, I began describing each end node as a microgrid. A microgrid is a self-contained entity responsible for managing its own energy use, generation, storage, conversion, and as a last resort, market operations. This model eliminates direct grid control of buildings. Maximum grid incentives, all delivered to a single energy services interface (ESI), the locus of market bidding for the building.

The ESI is the external face of the participants in smart energy. The ESI facilitates the communications among the entities that produce and distribute electricity and the entities that manage the consumption of electricity. An ESI may be in front of one system or several, one building or several, or even in front of a microgrid. In keeping with service integration principles, there is no direct interaction across the ESI.

Today, an ESI is most often on the outside of a building system. The leaders in commercial energy management, companies like Target, put the business between the ESI and the building systems. Target evaluates energy use, and changes in energy use as normal business decisions, and building systems respond to business operations. Target though, is unusually aware of its decision processes, has many nearly identical buildings, and has strict commissioning standards. For the rest of us to be like Target, we need a Building Systems Interface (BSI).

The BSI must expose several services. New systems will certainly incorporate the market-oriented interfaces of smart energy, for use inside the building microgrid. Other services will interact with the business, linking corporate calendars to building operations. Another will request and consume weather information; if nothing else, a data center should take advantage of a cold winter such as this to limit cooling loads.

Systems must tie their information to the space that the enterprise inhabits. It is not enough for points to self-describe themselves as an air handler—that air handler must describe itself in terms of the service it provides to a particular space. Space is what the building systems support, space is what the tenants recognize.

There is an enterprise service that links between the occupants and their activities and the BAS and its performance. It communicates to support business activities while using the common schedule communications developed for smart grids. It is aware of the market conditions and deals made with the grid though the ESI. It knows whether the volatile energy of the renewables-based grid is scarce or abundant. It can report back to the enterprise how and where energy is being used right now.

Even live-load, or plug-load, must be able to describe itself in relation to space. Panel sub-metering and BIM-based circuit tracing (PLie – panel layout information exchange) put even the coffee pot and copier as part of the BIM model for energy use. Even home appliances must be participants.

BSI and a blast from the past

Every now and then I run across an old email that I have long forgotten, but speaks to my current activities. I think that this comment, written long ago in the oBIX forum speaks to something I need to return to. Jon recently gave me and WS-Calendar and EMIX some excellent advice on on creating standards for re-use and extension.

-----Original Message-----
From: Considine, Toby (Facilities Technology Office)
Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 6:36 AM
To: 'jon.bosak@sun.com'
Cc: 'Grobler, Francois ERDC-CERL-IL'
Subject: RE: oBIX Guiding Principles

There are parts of Control Systems that are very business oriented. If an embedded control system detects that it needs maintenance, and can submit a maintenance request to an identified partner, clearly that work order looks like a normal business transaction.

Meeting and occupancy schedules might look like UBL (room will be occupied tomorrow from 2-4; use oBIX to inform HVAC, Access Control, Intrusion Detection, A/V management control systems. Read the Electric Meter before and after the meeting). Does the UBL standard extend the ICAL standard, or subsume it or...? Clearly, there is a benefit for scheduling functions to re-use commonly implemented scheduling requests.

These functions are in the future. What oBIX has to start with doing is exposing the event driven world of controls to the enterprise. For the most part, this starts with state. What are all the room temperatures on the 3rd and 4th floors? For how many hours did the compressors run today?Which areas of the building are currently secured? Some of this information is creeping into QOS agreements in real estate, and so intersects with the work of OSCRE (Open Systems for Commercial Real Estate). To my knowledge, UBL does not really include the nomenclatures for this because this is outside of the normal business functions. Am I wrong? Can you refer me to any relevant portions of UBL?

I think an early use for oBIX will be to provide a platform on which GRIDWISE (www.gridwise.org) type applications are built. That may be the first place where standard UBL functions hit, as price incentives are offered to buildings on the spot market to forefend brown-outs and the like. That feels more like bid/delivery/request rebate.

The construction industry has long had a separate open standard for construction documents, known as the IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) developed by the International Association for Interoperability (http://www.iai-international.org/iai_international/) and already required in many international construction projects. The IFC space includes construction documents, spatial data, spatial modeling, etc. The EU, in particular, leans heavily on this ISO specification, particularly in the Nordic countries. The largest landlord in the world, the GSA, has mandated that all transmittals for the design, construction, and acceptance of buildings. The closely related GBXML (Green Building XML) is a lightweight variant of IFCXML focused more on performance issues. GB Modeling, using GBXML for transferring building performance data, is required for those projects that wish to be designated as compliant with programs using words such as "sustainable" and "LEEDS". We have long considered that IFCML and the closely related GBXML were our most important shared spaces. Is there a defined interface/mapping between IFCXML and UBL?

Thanks for your comments

tc

-----Original Message-----
From: jon.bosak@sun.com
Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 9:20 PM
To: Considine, Toby (Facilities Technology Office)
Subject: Re: oBIX Guiding Principles

| G) If, as seem likely, this document is adopted as an OASIS standard,
| I recommend that we steal freely from this document, reusing as much
| as we can in our rules for developing subsidiary oBIX services as well
| as in the core document. It is well written and defends its decison
| in a language that is focused and apropriate for the enterprise
| developer.

Since UBL is probably going to become the dominant standard for international trade documents, why don't you just adopt the UBL schemas and have done with it? After all, UBL is based on a pretty widely adopted specification (xCBL 3.0) that was developed specifically for electronic marketplaces. If there are any data elements missing from UBL 1.0 that are needed for oBIX, we can probably include them in UBL 1.1.

Jon