Finding a Needle in the Internet of Things (part 1)

Things cost what they cost to install. Ongoing charges are, in the short term, fixed. Value may be the only thing you can control. In the Internet of Things, value will be determined by how many ways you can use that Thing. Value will be determined by how many different uses can use that thing. Some of those users will be other things.

Things (as in the Internet Of…) tend to be commodities. One thing is inherently like another. Once I have more than a small number of things, I need a way to distinguish between sensors, between pieces of building equipment, and even to distinguish between tangible services such as catering and transport services. One of the first places that all of us have seen things on the internet is in conference rooms, vehicles, and tools as they are scheduled within enterprise scheduling systems.

Discovery is essential to agile integration. If systems can discover each other, we do not need to map them. If systems can understand what they discover, they can integrate themselves. One of the requirements is common semantics, that is agreements as to how something is described (or describes itself). This post is about directory directory services for the internet of things.

In Calendars, people are identified by vCards. VCards are deeply embedded in CalDav, stil the most common protocol for writing new Calendar Apps and user interfaces. Many email systems support attaching your vCard to each outgoing message. VCards are electronic business cards, and just as in traditional business cards, different people choose to include different information on them. Also like paper business cards, various companies and organizations have developed their information and format standards for vCards.

After email, the most common place to find a vCard is in a directory. There is a deep historic link between the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and the vCard. LDAP is used to manage security as well as directory services in the biggest organizations. The link between directories and security is as natural as is role-based security. LDAP records include have the same variability as does the vCard standard. At some level, though, LDAP is the thing you use to get a vCard.

LDAP supports diversity of information returned, including security on particular aspects of the information. Over time, a varied set of what I will call here, for brevity, vCard profiles have been developed. These often have object-type characteristics. For example, the inetOrgPerson (RFC2798) is defined as a standard set of extensions to the organizationalPerson as defined in the ITU standard X.521. Many colleges and universities have collaborated to define the eduPerson to handle students, grad students, and faculty.

In LDAP, there is a long history returning different information about the same object in different security contexts. At universities, an LDAP will return different information when asked about a student or about staff, even when the target is the same person. Just as in medical information, the portions of student information that can be exposed to query vary widely by querier and context, and are controlled by federal privacy law. There are many security contexts, including when domestic relations go wrong, under which access to some attributes of a particular directory entry is limited. LDAP also supports multi-valued attributes easily. This is in sharp contrast with the normal expectations from, say, a SQL query.

In calendars, things that are not people are designated as Resources. Improvements to Resource vCards is a long-standing project of CalConnect. Some Resources may have a schedule, but not be schedulable. This usually means that it is scheduled by someone else using means you do not have access to, but to the user, it is not schedulable even so. Schedulable Resources may use vAvailability to indicate when and how they can be scheduled. It is of course possible, even probable, that different entities will receive a different vAvailability from the same Resource.

It will come as no surprise to my readers that I now come around to building-based resources. These are most frequently public rooms and building systems. Public rooms are invited to meetings as are other attendees. Smart buildings can optimize energy use while preserving amenity if they know when and by whom the building will be used. In a related post, I will describe how vCards for building-based resources will be standardized.

A key consumer of secure directory services for systems will be other systems. With discovery and directory services, they can find each other to interact. Through developing calendar standards, including vAvailability, they will learn when they can interact.

Secure discovery, self-integration, and autonomous assembly will be part of how we maximize the value of the internet of things.

Privacy, Self Defense, and Smart Energy

I spent some time last week down a country road, watching the local power. I watched three phases that were greatly out of balance. I observed trapezoidal wave forms. We could see the home appliances of everyone else on the road, as they each turned on and off.

Together, we watched the power coming into his lab. They were his neighbors, and he knew them from observation. He could relate when they changed their appliances, and how they lived their lives. He could tell from the patterns how they affected the shared local electric distribution circuit. There were some especially odd patterns, second level harmonics that caused some unusual recurring spikes. It wouldn’t be hard, simple machine learning, really, to learn these special patterns for some types of equipment, and then to search for them.

This is all so much easier than it was even a couple years ago. Affordable gigahertz sampling is no longer cost prohibitive. Industrial espionage can be done from across the street. Soon private detectives will be able to read the activities in houses from down the street, using only a power connection, pattern matching against an on-line database, and a little creativity. Your house and business is now an open book, with or without the participation of utilities.

This technology was not built to look out, however. Monitoring and analyzing the distribution feed is a mere side effect of the system I was checking out. The purpose of these systems is not to spy on the distribution system, but to defend against the distribution system. What we could see on the samples is also felt by the building.

The purpose of this monitoring is to fix the power inside. Each phase of power is simultaneous corrected to near ideal wave forms. The effects inside the building are extraordinary. When supplied with an ideal power wave, electric motors become audibly quieter. While that alone makes an industrial space pleasanter, it reflects an underlying reduction in vibration and in generated heat. At the same time, the motor begins to operate at its faceplate output.

This is what I mean by defense against the distribution system. Excess vibration, and the associated noise and heat, are caused by the noise on the electrical supply, by wave forms that are less than the ideal. Traditional power conditioning systems often create trapezoidal or triangular wave forms—they may protect from spikes and sags, while they increase wear and tear. It’s too early to predict how much ideal power forms will extend the life of equipment, but reduced noise and reduced heat are strong benefits on their own.

While one can hear the change in motor operation, florescent lights and digital equipment benefit as well. Long time readers of this blog know that my house is beset by something that causes even my incandescent lights to fail in clusters. Having watched the power on this nearby local distribution loop, it seems likely that I have seen the answer, even while all parameters are “within spec for home distribution.”

The plan of course, is for the local distribution to get worse. While we watched, we saw changes to power on the entire loop when the charging of a single neighbor’s electric vehicle began. Even the best solar panel installations affect these wave forms, and most installations are far from the best. The effects not only damage neighbor’s equipment, but they may increase metered power use for those neighbors as well.

Defense from the grid, especially from the smart grid is an important new market. Distributed energy resources are in all our future, and they make such defense more important.

An allied outcome of this defense is that the view from the outside is obscured. The systems behind the power controller cannot be inspected as we inspected the neighbors. Unbalanced power use, that is, power unevenly spread across the three power phases is balanced on the outside of the controller. Power factor is optimized. This ideal power load reduces metered power, often substantially. The operation of individual motors and digital systems looks from the supply-side as a single ideal consumer. Energy-use privacy is protected and restored.

As consumers, we don’t yet know how to think about and use this kind of product. As smart energy, distributed energy resources, and electric vehicles become more widely deployed, we will want to learn.

Work Plan for oBIX 2.0

Some of you know that the oBIX Committee (open Building Information Exchange) is meeting again. The work is moving ahead on multiple fronts. We have separated encodings (XML and COAP) from the core specification. We are working on separate transport specifications for SOAP and REST (including JSON). We are doing a refresh of the core specification for consistency and conformance. I am most excited, however about the oBIX 2.0, the enterprise services.

The core specification (1.x) requires each oBIX server to provide a lobby. Clients can ask the server what is in the lobby, and thereby discover how to interact with the system behind that server. Contracts are special purpose agreements that are added to the lobby. Clients can invoke contracts by accessing the elements listed in the lobby. Vendors and integrators can add functionality to an oBIX server by creating contracts to add to the lobby.

Our current plan is to define enterprise services by specifying new types of contracts to place in the lobby. oBIX servers will then state which types of contracts they support, which encodings, and which transports. As of March 2013, we anticipate the following sections:

Energy

oBIX Servers are likely to participate in collaborative energy ecosystems including those managed by Energy Interoperation (OpenADR 2.0) or as described by ASHRAE SPC 201. We plan to incorporate information models and semantics developed to support the US national Smart Grid efforts, including Green Button. Potential contracts include not only energy usage reporting, but projections and commitments as well. We anticipate leveraging the existing OASIS Energy Market Information Exchange (EMIX) Specific information exchange requirements as defined in NAESB REQ 21

Advanced Reporting and Aggregation (Historian)

The historian does not scale well in its current form. A request for, say, a one year history on several sensors is larger and more unwieldy than it need be. It may be necessary to support variations such as projections. We do not want to break compatibility.

Alarm Logic.

This topic extends alarm contracts to include logic for alarms. If A happens followed within three minutes by B. If the cycle between occurrences of A is less than 5 minutes. This is in effect defining diagnostics with interactions between functions. If I am talking to 100 oBIX servers, I may want to apply that diagnostic to every AHU attached to each of them.

Building Information Models (BIM)

In buildings, control systems operate building systems. Building systems support the various spaces in a building, whether securing them, monitoring, them, or conditioning them. The relation between a building system and spaces in a building is described in a Building Information Model (BIM). oBIX BIM contracts will describe how an oBIX server will make BIM accessible, and how to apply BIM as a semantic framework for the control points.

Enterprise Scheduling

Enterprise Scheduling applies the semantics of WS-Calendar to schedule interactions with building systems. This includes a notion of service oriented schedules instead of the control oriented schedules as today. (Example: Request room at temperature by 8:30 rather than Request room to begin heating at 8:10). This is likely to use the same semantic frameworks as security, i.e., to specify a room rather than a thermostat. Enterprise scheduling is made possible in part by the BIM framework as described above.

Security Composition

oBIX 1.0 defines a monolithic model, all or nothing, for access to points and settings. This access should be limitable by role and by organization. Advanced security contracts will define a means to define policy frameworks for secure access to oBIX servers. This is likely to be an intersection of roles, i.e., integrator, operator, tenant, guest as applied to business function. In buildings, business functions are defined by the spaces they are in. The relation between building systems and space can be found through reference to the BIM.

We will not define a mandatory set of roles, or a mandatory framework, but instead define a means to apply notions of space (say a particular tenant) and of role to access to an oBIX server. We anticipate a means to discover the roles available on a server, to map those roles into a discoverable space, i.e. BIM. This topic includes addressing federated security, and may include how to apply SAML, XACML, and similar specifications to oBIX servers.

Please contact me if you would like to join in this work.

Must retail energy users be mere price takers?

A significant wedge between those seeking to maintain the current regulated prices accompanied by DR and those looking to move to transactive energy for a self-regulating grid is the notion that retail customers are all mere price takers. A price taker watches the market and either buys or does not buy; he takes the prices the market offers. Some see that this “lack of power” can only be addressed by regulating the prices offered. This leads back to today’s model.

Committed positions break this model. A retail customer who commits to buying this much power at this rate for a given time period in the future establishes a committed position. With a committed position, if the customer needs more power at any time than the commitment, then the customer must make up the difference at the spots rates. If the customer needs less power than the commitment, he can only sell back the difference at spots rates, and then only if he finds a buyer. With this assumption of position risk, the customer also gains the ability to interact fully with the market.

In today’s regulated markets, the greatest value of energy storage is as a forward hedge by the energy supplier. The entity that stores the energy on premises cannot make up the economic value required by the storage. This storage is of value as a hedge for the retailer, not as an asset for the customer. This economic imbalance reduces the value of other distributed energy assets, such as distributed generation, as well. By limiting the value of energy storage to only the hedge value for the supplier, distributed energy assets are always undervalued.

Committed forward positions change this equation. A committed forward position in power is a contract that the buyer will purchase this energy whether or not he uses it, and that the supplier will provide the power no matter the market conditions at the time contracted for delivery. (Let’s leave aside for now the issues of true emergencies, liquidated damages, etc.)

When the market allows committed positions, the buyer is rewarded for better understanding his own energy needs. A buyer who is able to plan his energy use could package a series of positions, and take bids from the suppliers. These bids can be considered in the larger context of the business, such as labor planning or the needs of seasonal manufacture. A committed forward position then provides the buyer with choice while limiting risk in price and availability.

Committed purchases enable the buyer to take full advantage of his own distributed energy resources. Energy storage becomes a way to manage purchasing commitments, sometimes using excess energy in the commitment, sometime shaving peak use to stay within the commitment. Distributed generation is managed locally, where the knowledge if value, process, and commitments is greater.

Committed purchases of power move the retail energy buyer beyond the role of a mere price taker, to that of a full market participant. This devolves considerable autonomy to the end nodes of the grid. This increases the rewards of investing in distributed energy resources for those customers that value power surety and economic arbitrage. Because such investments are made by single sites, they will help us move to normal, innovative markets in energy technology.