What is New Daedalus?

Building Intelligence meets the Intelligent Building. The Intelligent Building negotiates with the Intelligent Grid. Emergency Management sends requests to the Intelligent Building to share its situation awareness with the first responder.

The concrete precision world of resource constrained embedded systems is recognizing the economical excess power provided by commodity computing. Readily available open source and free databases on these platforms are moving these systems from internal hash tables to OLAP. International consortia meet to find the ontology of meaning in engineered systems.

The internal processes of the control systems are being abstracted into services that can be offered up to the enterprise and to the home. System disciplines are now in place to build internet-scale control systems in which heterogeneity is the norm.

What can we build with these new tools? How will these trends transform how we interact with the physical world?

Back in early 2007, I participated in the GridWise Architectural Council’s Symposium on Business Interface Definitions, and then the annual OASIS Open Standards Symposium as chair of oBIX . At both events I was asked “Where do you blog on this stuff?” In answer, here is The New Daedalus .

In the years since then, I helped to write the US National Smart Grid Roadmap, I have helped develop the essential Market Interfaces for Smart Energy. My thoughts here have taken me around North America, Europe, and even to Asia. My thoughts on calendars helped win a national competition on medical scheduling held by the VA. I founded the Energy Mashup Lab, a non-profit dedicated to open source software for fractal microgrids and smart energy.

Toby Considine
January 2021