Service enabling Telecommunications – lessons for Buildings and Grid

Peter Carbone, Vice President of SOA for Nortel, gave a nice high level talk on the challenges facing a company that grew up with rigid account control and vertical integration in a regulated environment learning to dance in the world of SOA and mash-ups. As markets for building systems are still characterized by rigid account control and vertical integration, and the power grid is still vertically integrated, regulated, and almost complete account control, there are some useful lessons.

Infrastructure convergence was the enabling and driving change for telecommunications. Provisioning telecommunications was long the most difficult task. Over the last decade, the diverse communication infrastructure converged to a single packet-based infrastructure with resulting dramatic simplification of security and reliability. The questions move from “What low level communications do you need” to “What interactive services do you need?”

This evolution changed how Nortel had to think about and market their services. Before the change, Nortel sold vertically integrated applications that were inflexible. As the core technologies converged, Nortel was forced to decompose advanced services into core functions and then plug them back into the new architecture.

Fortunately, decomposing integrated services into core functions looks a lot like defining a service for service oriented architecture. Fundamental telecommunications functions can now be built into enterprise applications without requiring exotic skills are deep domain knowledge.

Skills-based routing and deployment was one example. Peter discussed a SAP integration with critical system causing expensive downtime, emergency part ordering, and synchronizing communication with an outside expert so that the repair personnel, the piece of equipment, and, via telecommunications and real-time identification of the expert on call, the expert’s telepresence were synchronized.

In a similar vein, he discussed abstracting the GPS function from the cell phone to block access in the security system when the phone was in a forbidden zone. Peter gave many more examples and you can find his slides on the OASIS conference site.

So what can building systems and the power grid learn from this?

Well, the owners expect the systems to just run, and are annoyed whenever someone says words like BACnet or LON (or any other control protocol) in their presence. We need to decompose advanced services to discover the core functions, from the owner’s and the tenant’s perspective, and present them as interfaces that can be plugged back into the enterprise.

As Peter summed up the C-Level response: “I just spent $100 Million fixing my processes, you had better be compatible.”

Building services that can present themselves as that can interact with SAP, or with PeopleSoft will have an advantage. The services that know how to display themselves on Google Earth will know how to request the nearest technician.

Likewise, Grid requests that present themselves to ERP services will find faster acceptance. Grid requests that describe grid pricing as shapes that can be pinned to Google Earth will enable the enterprise to come up with multi-site responses that may be different from any single site.

No one cares about the old vertical applications. Enterprise interactions are everything.

Semantic Assembly of Business Projects

I attended a super presentation this morning, that is a presentation on Semantics Utilized for Process management within and between Enterprises (SUPER). SUPER’s goal is to use ontological frameworks to make web services autodiscoverable and autoconfigurable.

While web services have enabled interactions between systems and companies more flexibly than ever before, they are still too hard to work with. Today’s web services were often created any naming standards were readily available. All too often, the similar items will have different names in very similar service offerings (poor semantic interoperability). When elements in two services share the same name, they may mean different things to the two services because they mean different things to the two companies (poor ontological interoperability).

Even when the fields have the same definition, they may be laden with external information that is not part of the schema. Certain aparantyl simple terms such as “shipping date” and “receiving date” may be overlaid with legal contracts that are not apparent in the web service description.

The SUPER project attempts to do the semantic assembly of business projects from existing services. By comparing ontologies, SUPER can rank available services as to how well they conform to the expectations of the business analyst. The goal of SUPER automated integration. Today, it can prepare a semi-automated response that leverages annotation, service comparison, and even composing hybrid services to deal with heterogeneity of service offerings.

Beware, though, as SUPER relies on a whole alphabet soup of standards.

SUPER uses Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO) to characterize systems, WSMO looks for strict WS compliance and strict decoupling of services. WSMO relies on ontology based classification of services to define core mediation services and execution semantics. WSMO is about service description, not implementation, defining a path to Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM).

SUPER augments SBPM by defining a semantic execution environment (SEE) based upon an open reference ontology. SEE is an architecture that defines what it is possible to ask for, but that does not specify how to do it, or at what granularity. SEE mediates between ontological representations rather than mediating between different behaviors

If you want to play around with this, there is a lot of open source material you can pull down, including:

• Apache ODE, a BPEL aware web server based on Apache
• WSMO Studio, an extended Eclipse
• WSMX on SourceForge
• SUPER, www.ip-super.org

These guys are bright and driven, and their work is well worth checking out.

Organizing System Behaviors

One Ring to rule them all , One Ring to find them , One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them – J.R.R. Tolkien

Central control, including influences on apparently distributed systems that their owners do not anticipate, are the bane of civil society in Tolkien’s classic trilogy. Today’s models for the control of another kind of power reach deep into businesses and people’s homes, and will ultimately provoke reaction that will limit their scope and range.

Today, building systems and energy user are participants in some very bad markets. Good markets have multiple participants making value decisions to trade freely. Good markets encourage the buyers to selected products based upon value delivered, however the buyer perceives value. Good markets drive innovation and performance as sellers compete to find more profitable ways to deliver the same value, or new ways to deliver more value, to those customers. Building systems and energy are not part of such a market.

Future power systems and future buildings will be interactive at every level, from the generation of power to the provision of building-side amenities. Old centralized models of control, especially a regulated focus on cost recovery instead of value delivery, provide the organizing tenets of today’s energy markets. Energy markets that share information and decision making will achieve greater acceptance and benefits through their influence on autonomous systems than central control ever will.

Buildings are becoming complex adaptive systems that involve large numbers of distributed agents and rules governing their interactions. These agents will react to the actions of other agents and to changes in the environment. The building systems will be autonomous, so control and decision-making will be decentralized and distributed. As these agents mature and develop, they will interact with the businesses in the buildings, the lives of those in the homes, and the external environment of the power grid and environment. These autonomous systems will ultimately adapt to the changes that they themselves helped to bring about through their independent decisions.

A defining characteristic of a complex adaptive system, and thereby of well functioning markets, is that they are self-organizing; self-organization is an emergent property. Emergence simply means that a larger-scale pattern emerges out of the interaction of the smaller-scale decisions and actions of the agents.

Emergent patterns arise out of the interaction of decentralized agents acting with distributed control. Distributed control is actually self control in response to individual incentives. The most effective and innovative markets exhibit emergent order, when the larger-scale pattern that emerges is one of coordination of voluntary activity. This contrasts greatly with the ineffective and anti-innovative results that derive from the imposition of a pattern in a top-down or command-and-control manner. Even in ostensibly similar markets, the two processes of achieving order can yield dramatically different results.

This month marks the 100^th anniversary of the decision to regulate U.S. markets in energy generation and distribution. The decision was in part technical; the means to measure use were limited and control functions were primitive. A poor understanding of markets contributed to the decision. The largest factor, however, was the technocratic populism that held sway around the world for much of the century—a now discredited theory that was at the heart of most of the last century’s wars and social unrest. Markets for electricity generation, distribution, and use are among the last remnants of these failed models for organization of complex systems.

The technology props to this bad theory are no longer valid. It is time to use new technology and new models of system organization to end the 100 year experiment that wastes energy and inhibits innovation in the name of control.

The knowledge problem of building systems and energy markets

Energy blogger and economist Lynne Kiesling writes at the site “Knowledge Problem”, presumably a reference to Hayek’s observation that individuals are filled with limited and mostly erroneous knowledge. This knowledge problem makes it impossible for centrally planned economies, or for anything other than markets, to collect or filter the knowledge necessary to answer questions of production and distribution.

Markets for autonomous building systems, and therefore energy markets, suffer from another kind of knowledge problem, one that damages the market and prevents its development. In this market, the gap between what we know building systems can do, and what owners and operators are aware that they can ask for is immense. Their intermediaries, the sales forces of non-innovative systems, seem bound to keeping them uninformed, to support account control. In the middle stand the public utilities commissions (PUCs), effectively willful in their populist Luddism. The architects and building engineers seem as little informed as their customers, or perhaps merely uninterested in spending and time in this low margin, low bid portion of their projects.

These are strong words, and strong accusations, but they were bolstered by my recent time at FIATECH. At FIATECH, those companies with the most intense process oriented facilities work with the best engineers and the best construction companies to address inefficiencies caused by lost information in capital projects. In this forum, the engineers who design the largest chemical plants meet with sophisticated owner / operators of those same plants. And yet, even here, a strong dichotomy of knowledge was obvious.

The best engineers, and the owners of the best construction companies did not blink an eye when I talked of autonomous agent-based systems, each defending their system-based mission, and responding to economic choreography from the business enterprise. They readily acknowledged as almost too obvious to speak of that immense improvements in efficiency heightened amenities were readily available for the taking. They were well aware that 60% of the energy flowing over the power grid was supplying operations that could see their energy use cut in half almost overnight.

This group thought, though, that markets based upon economic responsiveness would never develop. The PUCs would never act in any way that would reduce their own power. The power companies would continue to market just enough “green campaigns” to keep the unsophisticated non-technical populace happy—and not disturb their iron grip on existing franchises. Building owners will never demand performance and interactivity and so there is no use developing it.

Building owners and operators have opposing prejudices. They can readily imagine participating in energy markets. They readily leap to tell me the services they would like to be able to get from their buildings. They are eager to get some transparent access to high-level information on building maintenance and operations to control costs and be able to audit their own operations.

Building owners, however, are sure that the technology is not developed. They report that their suppliers are unwilling or unable to provide these services. I have often been told that we don’t know how to do this yet. Last fall, at a charrette on intelligent buildings, it was the consensus of the consulting engineers in the room that we did not know enough to make building systems autonomous and responsive.

So there we have a different knowledge problem. The most technically sophisticated, with deepest knowledge of the current state of the art know that although the technology is already available, that pure politics would never allow the market to develop. Those able to make purchasing decisions are willing to buy, but know that the technology is far away. The knowledge problem for building systems is getting the best engineers and the forward looking owners to know what the other knows.