Commercial Use of Live Energy Models

This is one of a series of posts on how the semantic expression in WS-Calender is beginning to affect buildings and smart energy. WS-Calendar recently completed its third public review and will soon be published as Committee Specification 1.0.

In a previous blog, I discussed new directions in commissioning; including commissioning that incorporates BIM, schedules, and continuous energy models.

Performance Contracting and the new Commissioning

Many building owners are suspicious of energy performance contractors because the performance contractor is both a player and a score keeper. Because a significant effort is required to understand the information in building systems, there are significant start-up costs. These costs, both in money and time, require that each contract include a significant minimum contract lengths over which to amortize the up-front costs. These up-front costs make it uneconomical for energy contracting to use a third party auditor to verify results.If the owner selects a new a new performance contractor, the up-front costs will be incurred again.

Standard semantic tags and ready access to a light-weight BIM can change this.

Imagine a market wherein a cloud-based energy performance contractor could offer same-day initial reports. That same market also supports a number of 3^rd party auditors, cloud-based, each able to independently assess the results of the performance contractor. Each of these parties can hook up to the BSI, read the BIM, read the tags, and begin analyzing right away. A potential energy performance contractor could offer the building owner a selection of third party auditors to report the success of the contract.

This competition between cloud-based services would drive rapid innovation. On one side driving costs down, on the other driving richer models. These models are likely to build upon two significant efforts currently underway. ASHRAE SPC201 would inform the models, and through the linkage of systems and space, become more nuanced. Schedule-based business assertions, as we are beginning to see in the links of WS-Calendar and the IFCs would make these models more business aware.

Continuous commissioning based on such a foundation would support an ecosystem of cloud-based service suppliers, each able to grow to scale.

Retail use of Live Energy Models

As we move in this direction, we move from information models that are tuned to reflect changed operating hours to models that can tied increased energy use to short term activities, including, say those associated with a sale in one portion of a store. That portion of a store with an ongoing sale may have increased HVAC driven by increased traffic or brighter lights to attract shoppers and display the merchandise, and other enhanced amenities. A side effect of the brighter lights may be increased heat load, thus causing still more HVAC requirements than at first expected.

The most respected retailers with superior operations are already using these sorts of models to fine-tune their special Sales.

Non-Energy adaptive re-use of new Energy Components

Because the approaches described above rely on the composition of multiple standards, they create components that building integrators can re-assemble to meet other purposes.

Emergency responders have long wished for a variety of interactive means to acquire situational awareness of the facilities they are entering. The standard light-weight building model described above is a natural basis for situation awareness sharing. During an emergency response, the goal may be closer to raw sensor readings than to energy use. Those sensor readings, like the performance information, cannot be interpreted without a framework that indicates the spaces and the business purposes where those sensors are located.

Common abstractions, business purposes, and frameworks are the foundations for policy-based interactions with any system. The business-purpose-based analysis of space and system and schedule, is a likely target for adaptive reuse for emergency-response based policy. In the simplest (and direst) case, the facility is on fire, every asset is at risk, and so every bit of information about a building might be shared. In a simpler case, if the Spill Response Team is responding to a minor spill in the warehouse, it is inappropriate to share with them acess to, say, a webcam in the executive suite.

Easy integration of the Internet with Things: Calendar Subscription and Syndication

I use Outlook in my day to day life. It shows me an aggregate calendar, with meetings I accept at the office (one account) meetings I accept not at the office (another email account) and two corporate calendars: one based in Exchange, and one in SharePoint. When I was working on the national smart grid roadmap, my Outlook showed the calendar of that SharePoint project as well. In Outlook, I can turn each calendar off or on, and when aggregated, each appointment was a different color by source. I live by Calendar aggregation.

In my Phone, which happens to be an Android, I used to have a calendar for each email account. Each has different security set-ups and realms. Each source has different policies about sharing calendar on distributed devices. It was easy to miss appointments when on the road as I switched between different companies.

With an overnight upgrade pushed out by my phone company, this changed to a single calendar. That single calendar is color coded, showing the source of each event. Some of the things that are on my phone are “not quite meetings”, when GMAIL has interpreted something as a meeting although I have not accepted the meeting. The rules GMAIL uses for this appear to be similar to, but not identical to, the workings of Google Calendar.

Because I speak regularly in front of large audiences, I am always working in concrete examples of abstract issues. I use my phone as a prop when talking about the problem of smart homes and vehicle charging. The narrative goes as follows:

• This phone manages an ever changing set of security issues as dictated by my various calendar providers. Those security changes (passwords, policies, …) are things I do not want to build into my home. “I changed my password at work today—now I have to tell my refrigerator and my car” is not sustainable.
• Whatever the security policies, the calendar that I can see on my phone is semi-public, i.e., it has already been de-securitized for sharing. It may be a top-secret meeting, but it is now in a state wherein I can look at it over dinner and say “No, not next Tuesday.” It is, in effect the external face of my personal (corporate) schedules
• The phone is a “syndication point”; it syndicates each of the calendars that I subscribe to, to tell me what to do today.
• The OLED screen on the magnetic computer stuck on the front of the refrigerator is another syndication point. It can subscribe to feeds from my android, the wife’s blackberry, and the kid’s iPhone, to develop the syndicated household calendar.
• Note that each syndication point chooses what to share with downstream subscribers; the household calendar does not necessarily look like the sum of the upstream calendars. Policies about privacy and sharing, and key words that make a meeting “private” are managed upstream, and each syndicator can apply its own policies atop those.
• There is no need for end-to-end security, no need for shared secrets the length of the chain.

I may choose to create additional information within the house. The party, family church, Sunday afternoon football viewing may all be events originating in a house-based schedule and not appearing in any of the subscribed calendars. Or perhaps the household calendar is just another subscribed calendar fed into the syndication. That is an implementation detail that no one but the magnet-on-the-refrigerator computer needs to know.

My phone Calendar, then is an aggregation of calendars that I potentially syndicate out to other calendars.

If we flesh out the needs of the electric car, negotiating expensive fast charges and cheap slow charges, it needs to negotiate only with this household schedule. It may learn its own secrets, such as how far I drive when I go to choir practice. It may learn off-the-schedule stuff, such as that I frequently stop at the bar (an extra 10 miles of driving range) on the way home from choir practice. It does not need to share that information upstream to my house, or with my electric utility. It merely uses this information itself to make decisions autonomously about charging strategies.

The car has its own calendar for sharing. Based upon what it has learned, not only about my schedule (from the house) but about my habits, it can create a schedule of charging needs. It syndicates *that* schedule to the house, and negotiates with the house for access to market. The house syndicates the requirements from all the systems it supports, and uses them to guide it market position in energy.

The same calendar may be syndicated in different ways. The house subscriptions may include multiple children of the same syndicate. The house may learn from its subscription to my Android that I am out this evening, and do not need heat and lights in my rooms. The house may learn from the Calendar in the car, that I need power before this evening to support that same trip out. It is OK for the syndication to affect the houses buying position twice. There is no need for round-tripping or end-to-end tracking. The information is consumed, decisions are made, and market positions are created.

OK, this is a nice tale of autonomous systems relying on aggregated schedule streams to create time-dependent market positions. It is time to start thinking about Calendar Subscription. Aggregation, and Syndication, and of touch-less integration with the Internet of things.

Scheduling Resources and Operations with BIM

Recently, I wrote of standards for calendar synchronization, vcards, and directory services. This week, in a meeting on iResource, we explored the Enterprise IT perspective on the same issues. Today, I will place these two views side by side, and look for a solution.

In enterprise calendaring, conference rooms were originally added to corporate address books as if they were another person. An account was created in the corporate directory for each conference room, albeit an account that lacked an employee ID. This account was assocated with a calendar server and perhaps an email account. Conference rooms were set up Justas were senior staff that do not manage their own schedule. Anyone could invite the conference room to a meeting. An assigned administrative assistant received all schedule requests.

Over time, this process became formalized and these accounts were flagged as Resources. Resources in mail and calendar servers may reject or discard all email other than schedule requests. A Resource may automatically accept all requests it receives, or it may automatically reject all requests when already scheduled. Tools, projection equipment, phone bridges, and office vehicles are all often scheduled as Resources. Some systems automatically set the Meeting Location to the display name of the Conference Room.

Now Resources need more definition in Enterprise scheduling systems. To the enterprise calendar world, a Resource might ebe A Conference Room, a Phone Bridge, a Projection Screen, possibly a catered Pot of Coffee—in the Scheduling World, I might need to invite all 4 to a Meeting.

Details:

• Some Rooms have a Projection Screen and Some do not.
• Some Rooms have a permanently installed Phone Bridge. Some Bridges can be booked and an event support staff will put one in the room. Some rooms may not have a phone connection so even if the Bridge is brought in, it will not work.
• Catering is based in the North Building, and only North Building and its immediately adjacent buildings are capable of meeting the Coffee Pot requirement.
• Each room has a capacity (10 people. 25 people. 400 people)

Task: Respond to “I need a room for 35 with a phone bridge, projection screen, and coffee”

In some cases, each Resource might also be associated with a fixed or variable cost. A Calendar server needs standard semantics to present candidate rooms to the organizer. I

In world of buildings, the source for this information is the BIM. When a building is completed, every room is identified by purpose. Each room is linked to the system or systems it supports or that support it. There are standard names for each amenity. These names and their values will define the common directory information needed for smart scheduling in enterprise calendar systems. That is iResource.

For smart energy and smart buildings, we need to ensure that this scheduling information gets to the systems that operate the building. Each room is fully described in BIM. BIM can use consistent information through design, construction, commissioning, and maintenance and facility operation.

But BIMs are large, complicated information models, with far more detail than is need for the calendar server. BIMs have more information than is needed for maintenance and operations, too. Fortunately, we have a format for transferring information from BIN to a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS). This simplified format is the Common Operations Building Information Exchange (COBIE). COBIE includes lists of all spaces [rooms] as well as the fixed and movable assets identified in each spaces.

Once the resources match in the building systems and in the enterprise calendar server, we can use standards-based synchronization to align schedules within the two. Building systems are notified automatically of the 2:00 to 3:00 meeting for 25 people in room 207. A noteworthy aspect of this approach is that the catering service can be notified ("Coffee for 25 in room 207") with a precisely equivalent synchronization with the calendar service hosting their coffee service.

It has become a standard function for BIM software to export a COBIE file. Many CMMS systems routinely import COBIE to define new buildings; a few are themselves able to export information using the COBIE format.

IResource should use the attribute names and values defined in COBIE. These attributes then become the basis for Resource directories, and this means the basis of a vCard standard for building-based Resources.

Standard vCards and directory services for building-based resources promise to accelerate smart use of buildings, smart operation of buildings, and smart scheduling of buildings. vCards provide a basis for standardized synchronization services between enterprise calendars and building system calendars. Using the existing COBIE specification as the basis for service vCards will make the standard arrive sooner and improve completeness and accuracy of information.

Dr.Bill East at the Army Construction Engineering Research Lab (CERL) kindly directed me two three standard models, for the duplex, office, and clinic.

http://buildingsmartalliance.org/index.php/projects/commonbimfiles/

http://buildinginformationmanagement.wordpress.com/2012/01/10/cobie-and-bamie-specifications-released/

The Path to Smart Energy

For the last two years I have been so immersed in smart energy that I sometimes lose track of the big picture myself. This post goes back to basics.

The power industry of North America has provided its customers with the greatest life style that any civilization has ever had. The old service model assumes an ever-present supply of power that is predictable, abundant, and inexpensive. World-wide, our plans are to reduce the power supplied by predictable an inexpensive power sources, to replace them with power sources that are intermittent and less predictable, and that are widely distributed across the grid, including within homes, businesses, and neighborhoods. The old service model will not survive.

None of us wants to face deteriorating life-styles or reduced ability to provide quality services and products as energy supplies become less dependable. Smart Energy is the means we will use to expand both amenities and service quality.

Smart energy looks to each home, business, and industrial site to take responsibility for the management of its own energy in the face of an ever-changing supply. While efficiency is important, it is a small part of the story. Early efforts react to infrequent temporary and perhaps unanticipated shortages by degrading services, i.e., by turning things off. The proactive approach is to pre-consume energy, to take advantage of the more frequent periods of energy surplus in ways that there will be no degradation of service during shortages. As this shifts energy purchase to times of inexpensive supply, smart energy will provide better service for less.

Energy use is more than power use; smart energy is about more than power markets. Smart energy systems use thermal, pressure, chemical, and potential energy to support their purpose. Through balancing a changing portfolio of energy resources to meet the demands placed on them, smart buildings, homes, and facilities will use changing processes to provide consistent and high quality results.

Every node on the power grid, i.e., commercial buildings, homes, and industry, will act as a microgrid. Smart microgrids manage their energy use, generation, storage, recycling, conversion, and rely on market operations (buying and selling) only to make up the difference. Off-grid facilities already act as microgrids; they will become more prevalent as smart energy improves the quality of this choice. Microgrids can be combined into larger microgrids to enhance resilience, to encompass the neighborhood, the office park, the military base, and the campus.

Smart energy is information based. Systems and devices will provide information on their present and anticipated future energy requirements. They will consume information from energy markets and from the predictions of their peers. They will gain situation awareness from weather services and other external sources. They will exchange schedules and requirements with the personal and enterprise systems they support. New energy moves beyond performance to doing the right thing at the right time. Smart energy systems will be autonomous, self-monitoring, and self-managing.

Our homes, commercial buildings, and industry, will share the burden of energy quality, reliability and production with their suppliers. With the new standards ready to use, we have the opportunity for market-driven innovation incented by grid-based economic signals. Today we have the public interest and attention to bring products rapidly to market. The innovators and ventures able to take advantage of the opportunities in these new market realities will reap large rewards.

The end nodes of the grid are consumer-driven, and so are able to support more vibrant technology markets than can any central service. The promise of new energy is to achieve societal benefits by aligning energy supply and use while offering better amenities to buildings, homes, and their occupants while costing less. The challenge of new energy is to bring the digital systems in every system and appliance in our lives into the internet of things, and to have them respond to our needs and wants.