Smart Energy in Industry: Introducing MRP4

Last week, I spoke at the Department of Energy’s Industry to Grid (I2G) Summit, a pre-meeting of the ARC World Industrial Forum. For me, it felt like something of a homecoming. Several careers ago, my biggest customers were manufacturers. In the late 70’s, popular imagination held US manufacturing to be dead, poorly managed and low quality. In a famous Newsweek article, a celebrity athlete boasted of a summer in the UAW, during which he deliberately added rattles to pass the time. As often happens, a renaissance had begun some years before public perception hit bottom.

As a young programmer, I was working with companies trying to improve quality while keeping costs under control. With double digit inflation the norm, the US was beginning its great inventory squeeze. A passing familiarity with the Japanese Kanban system could take you far in industrial consulting. JIT inventory was being supplemented by JIT production. In Toronto, at the world APICS conference, we split MRP (Materials Requirements Planning) into MRP1 and the new MRP2. MRP2 reached beyond the factory floor to incorporate sales budgeting and HR planning. A year later, I first saw AutoCAD, astonishing because it ran on a PC.

Those were the roots of today’s integrated global supply chain management. Eventually MRP2 came to cover all facets of a company, and was re-christened ERP. Time-phased resource acquisition is a critical component of today’s commerce. Executives in every sector now are evaluated based on ratios determined by how lean their inventory is.

Even when it makes no sense, we apply these management principles today. For example, Coal plants used to pride themselves on weeks or even months of supply on hand. Coal is easy to store, and it does not go bad. Still, many utilities today run on same day coal deliveries; any interruption of the supply chain, of the constant stream of trains from mountain to generator, would take a significant portion of US electrical supply off line.

This last week, we saw the effects of a similar lean supply chain in natural gas. The cold snap increased demand and reduced supply, causing affecting electricity supplies in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and California. Lean supply chains are brittle. Through ERP, we have made are electricity supplies brittle as well.

Current plans are that we introduce intermittent electricity sources, i.e., solar and wind and tides, throughout the grid. Today, we backstop these with the same natural gas whose supply chain we manage so tightly. Lean supply chains and thin markets demand predictability. When smart grids fail, lean supply chains can make then fail badly, and the effects will be regional.

Pulling this back to my early days in industry, APICS propagated the essential equations for to compute supply chain decisions. In those days before PowerPoint, I used to be able to write these equations, in the style of a grammar school teacher, on the board, behind my back, while facing my clients. Many of them depended upon another, the Cost of Stock-out (COS). The simplest COS was solely lost sales per day. The better ones started with opportunity costs and factory reconfiguration and extended to lost reputation and permanent loss of customers. It is easy to undervalue the COS.

Public Utility Commissions have made affordability their top concern for decades. Utility executives strive to make their financial ratios look like other industries. Volatile energy supplies will increase the likelihood of stock-outs, i.e., shortages of basic supplies. Lean supply chains and renewable energy create a dangerous mix.

The industrial decision-makers in the audience wanted a quick take-away on what smart energy means for them. Many of them generate their own power, and are looking for better ways to bring their excess to market. Others are just beginning to consider the effects volatile prices that swing every day. To me, it was easy, they are already the thought leaders in this area. Industry gave us MRP1 which grew into MRP2. MRP3 is ERP, the dynamic management of resource supply and use that runs our global supply chains and businesses of all kinds. For the end node, smart energy is MRP4, accounting for volatility of supply, and factoring it directly into scheduling on the factory floor.

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

Continuous programming for Smart Energy Buildings

Best practices in high performance buildings recommend continuous commissioning. Keeping building systems at peak performance requires knowing what high performance looks like, and how that performance changes over time. But performance requirements change over time. Policy based system management requires that we know the purpose of each room. We need continuous programming for buildings.

Building programming is the name of the pre-design conversations about what an owner expects to get out of a building. Designers ferret out each purpose. The design team and the owners establish clear expectations of the expected performance for each function. Some praxis defines the energy performance expectations for each space as well. This one time activity is complete before serious design begins.

This program should guide the initial commissioning requirements. Does this space support the ventilation requires of a dining area within it energy budget. Does another space meet its energy budget while supporting high-end retail? Does the ventilation support maintaining alert cubicle workers throughout a long day? These considerations can support policy based building system management.

There are two barriers to developing systems to support this model. There is no standard for passing the original program information to the commissioning process. Programs change.

It is quite common at Universities to spend 100 grand to renovate a brand new building. During the years between programming and construction, some purpose changes, some new program started, and 4 offices are now a classroom. The break area is now a data center. The back lab is now a reception space for the new academic discipline; it now has an exterior door. In commercial buildings, each new tenant may have new requirements. Things change

Even without renovations, the building program changes, and with it, the performance requirements. The squash court becomes a spinning class, supporting many sweating exercisers rather than two. The conference room becomes a break room, and adds a refrigerator and microwave. The new break room must be better ventilated, to avoid tormenting the work force with the smell of microwave popcorn. These changes create new program requirements that should in turn update the energy performance requirements.

To meet their promise, LEED buildings need to be commissioned against their designed performance, the design that was built on the original programming. To maintain that performance, this commissioning should be continuous and automated. To keep that commissioning meaningful, it its targets should be updated as the buildings program requirements change. And that requires continuous programming.

The Fourth Amendment and Smart Grids

If we are not careful, smart grids are in direct collision with the bill of rights. Some smart grid activities define or enable business practices for balancing energy supply and demand. There is a direct link between commonly accepted business practices and some definitions of our constitutional rights. With the best of intentions, we may be casually removing significant barriers to some of our most cherished freedoms.

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is the part of the Bill of Rights which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures. During the American Revolution, British forces made extensive use of writs of assistance, a sort of general search warrant that could be extended and used without ongoing review. In response, the Fourth Amendment created a standard whereby government searches must be issues only on a discovery of probable cause, and specifically limited in location and as to the matters being searched for, based on specific information supplied to a court.

The Fourth Amendment is the most explicit source of any support for privacy that I can find in the Constitution.

Dr Orin Kerr is one of the most respected legal voices on Fourth Amendment issues. Dr Kerr blogged this week on the relationship between technology, common practices, and developing standards for reasonable search (see reference below). Specifically, Dr Kerr was exploring the ten year old Supreme Court ruling in Kyllo vs. United States that defines the limits of police use of high technology in warrantless searches.

In cartoon form (IANAL), police scanned houses with some sort of IR scanning system and noted a hot spot in the attic. From the hot spot, they deduced that the defendant was growing marijuana under grow lights in his attic. Kyllo asserted that this was a prohibited search under the 4^th amendment. The question was, in effect, is a non-intrusive search using high tech an unreasonable search. Clearly, if Kyllo had been growing the marijuana in his front yard, there would have been no dispute when police noticed this when on routine patrol. Previous rulings had stated that police fly-overs are legal searches because non-police could fly over the property and spot the plants; the property owner has no reasonable expectation of privacy applied to aerial views of his property.

In this case, the search was ruled unconstitutional; Kyllo won. The Supreme Court adopted a test designed to let the result change with social practice: “when . . . the Government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a “search” and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant.” Because infrared temperature sensing was not in “general public use,” the thermal imaging was a “search” that required a warrant.

Dr. Kerr was blogging on whether under this standard, the search in Kyllo was still prohibited. Remote infrared temperature-sensing has become quite common in a wide range of applications. I heard an ad on the radio yesterday for a remote home thermometer enabling mom to take a sleeping child’s temperature from the door without waking the child. Thermal images of houses to reveal gaps in insulation have become common; many utilities will pay for them as part of energy efficiency efforts. The question was, then, is this high tech device now considered to be in in “general public use,” and if so, can the police use it without a warrant without violating the Fourth amendment.

And so, at last, I loop back to smart grids.

Some business practices we are defining, particularly in what we are calling Managed Energy, can routinely monitor the activity of every device in a home. If we establish these practices as general practice, have we eliminated any Fourth Amendment shield against the use of the same techniques by police?

Analysis of electrical power consumption reveals more than you might guess. Research a decade ago explored what engineers could learn from these signals. One anomaly occurred almost every day in a home somewhere between a half hour and two hours after the owners left each day. Further research determined that the family dog waited each day until it was sure that its owners were really gone for the day—and then climbed onto the warm waterbed. They were detecting the change in the pattern of water heater use. Further research demonstrated an ability to distinguish how much activity was on that waterbed…

When we define business practices for the smart grid, we are doing more than solving a a difficult engineering problem. We may be creating practices that re-define our precious constitutional rights. Privacy is more than a best business practice for smart grids.