New Daedalus

buildingSmart is proving to be more evangelical than its predecessors NBIMS and IFC. This is an indication that the participants feel that the slow committee work is done, the concepts have been proved, and it is time to change the way buildings are designed, built, and operated.

To accomplish the change to information sharing and stewardship across the full lifetime of a building, many people in many industries will need to change their business practices simultaneously. buildingSmart is an effort to transform the way buildings are designed, built and operated based on the principles of BIM. To accomplish this, many people in many related businesses will need to transform how they work together. ONUMA is engaging the harder work of social change flat on in BIMstorm.

As I understand it, the first BIMstorm will be the public competitive design of 30 blocks of Los Angeles beginning January 31.

It looks like there first major evangelical effort will be the public competitive design of 30 blocks of Los Angeles beginning on January 31…Owners and developers can still request that their project site to be included in the BIMstorm even if it is not in the identified area.

BIMstorm will be a cross disciplinary effort (well, it would have to be!) with standards-based exchange of information. Teams include:

• Assessors
• Appraisers
• Architects
• Brokers
• Building Inspectors
• Building Product Suppliers
• City Agencies
• Developers
• Emergency Responders
• Engineers
• Facility Managers
• Landlords
• Lenders
• Other city and state agencies (domestic and international)
• Owners of Existing Properties
• Planners
• Tenants

At the start of the BIMstorm™ selected teams will be assigned a specific site. Each site will have a recommended program based on actual project requests. Judging will take place at the end of the BIMstorm™ and awards will be given for various categories. The intent is to demonstrate real-tiime collaboration, rapid design and simulation of projects.

Some of you might want to sign in to watch the melee…

http://BIMstorm.com/LAX .

Building Information Modeling (BIM) has been described by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) as "the most significant transformational event in our business for the past 500 years". Today, it also means different things to different people. The National BIM Standards (NBIMS) is an effort to change the entire facility design, construction, and acquisition process to catch up to best practices in other engineering and financial disciplines.

There is an unfortunate confusion in terminology I must address early on. Building Modeling refers to mathematical models of a building, including its materials, so it can be analyzed prior to construction. Using a building model, blueprints and construction documents are mere projections or reports of the underlying model. The Building Information Model comprises all of the information involved in the design, construction, and operation of a building, beginning with the earliest design intents. The Building Model is just one portion of the BIM, and the NBIMS specifies that the building model follow certain standards.

A recent article published by American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), suggested that using BIM offered the following benefits:

Design:

• 20% to 50% reduction in Design Cycle Time
• 100% Accurate Procurement package

Construction:

• Time and Cost reductions 20% to 40%
• Reduced Rework

Operation:

• Life-Cycle O&M reduction 10%-40%
• Reduced Handover/Turnover time

Even these numbers represent only a part of the benefits. Last year, the International Codes Council (ICC) demonstrated automated code compliance checking of a BIM; their goal is same-day code compliance review. The latest Energy Modeling software is able to reads the BIM directly, enabling iterative modeling as the design changes. Many of the current engineering, environmental, and design initiatives start with the use of BIM as a requisite for participants. BIM is seen a key enabler for future energy systems, from the Galvin Electricity Initiative to the GridWise Architectural initiatives, to the Zero Energy Commercial Building.

The goal of NBIMS is a common framework and format for sharing BIMs across vendors and organizations. Most CAD vendors, including AutoDesk, Bentley, and ArchiCAD read and write BIM datasets. Increasingly these BIM datasets are NBIMS compliant. Using NBIMS, data developed during initial programming is transmitted with design and operation data, and all information continues to add value throughout the facility life-cycle.

BIM is so large, and so important, that it is hard to understand. Instead, like the blind men and the elephant, we can stumble toward it from a variety of perspectives. In the near future, I plan to set some of these blind men loose, and see what they grab…

Yesterday, the FIATECH focus group met to review the Capital Projects Technology Roadmap. I sat in as representative for the roadmap’s Element 5. Element 5 is titled The Intelligent Self Maintaining Self Repairing Facility. In case you were wondering, last night’s post was a summary of Element 9 from the roadmap. On the way, I stopped in the Frederick, Maryland, IHOP, fueling up and planning what I would say if they asked me what I, or the 5^th Element, required as top priorities.

BIM for Control Systems

No one is using BIM to define control systems. Just as chip design was the last part of electronics fabrication to be computerized, the most technical part of construction is the last to be designed. As the Director of Buildings at UNC once said, “Control systems are designed by a man standing on a bucket.”

BIM for control systems will codify standards for design and develop formal semantics for the services provided by each control system. These system semantics will be linked to the formal performance metrics to measure explicit performance goals. Retro-commissioners know that the problem restoring systems to their original design is that, in many cases, the design does not work. If these systems were fully designed, they would.

Life Cycle Commissioning

Design intents should indicate goals for building performance. When a building model is developed, the energy model should be run directly out of the building model. The energy model should then be compared to the design intents. The energy model, then, becomes a means of commissioning the design against the design intents. The process should be repeated as the design is changed, particularly after value engineering. These energy models then become the basis for traditional commissioning.

The performance goals and metrics developed early in the process are then available to the traditional commissioning agent. The commissioning information should be entered into the building information store to be readily available to service personnel or retro-commissioners.

Since many of the measurements are based upon designed control system metrics, there is no reason not to take those measurements every day – and analyze them as well. Instead of waiting for system components to fail, this would allow regular review of how each system is performing as a system.

Service Oriented Building Systems

One we have the building semantics and building metrics defined during design, then we have the core pieces we need expose control system interfaces as services. No one other than maintenance personnel ever has a reason to issue instructions to a building system except through a service interface. Services hide complex processes and expose only those interactions that are appropriate for the tenant, the landlord, or the enterprise system.

Security definitions of standard roles.

We need standard role definitions to control access to the service oriented building systems. Based upon design intents, the designer can assign particular functions to roles known to the building system. A first pass might be, in order decreasing privilege, Operator, Landlord, Tenant, Visitor, Guest. Maintenance would not be restricted to working through the service interface, and so needs no special role.

Along with roles, we need standards for defining building zones. Zones might be rooms or groups of rooms. They might be determined by cooling system or by security needs.

The job of the building systems integrator then becomes matching control functions and sensor points to zones and assigning internal operations to roles. With identity determined by a third party, the intersection of zones and roles as assigned to each identity provides the basis for secure interoperable building operations.

So that’s my wish list. Too bad I had to leave after one day to go to Grid-Interop…they never got to ask.

Data centers consume huge amounts of electricity, much of it wasted. Data centers convert electricity to heat, so all energy used for computing is paired with a similar load for heat removal. Rethinking data centers is a good way to make a strong impact on energy usage in a hurry.

All computers use direct current (DC) to actually run. So does most consumer electronics. That little brick, or wall wart on the power cord transforms power from the alternating current (AC) of the power grid to DC to be used by the computer. In most desktop computers and servers, that “brick” is internal to the computer. Improving this process is straight-forward, and does not require any fundamental re-engineering of the computers.

Recently I was reading that the EPA is proposing higher efficiency standards for power conversion efficiency in computer systems. Most systems today still have not met the current version of these standards, called EnergyStar. What caught my eye was how much power is wasted even in today’s EnergyStar compliant systems. The numbers are so large that they make the case for re-thinking power systems for data centers far stronger than I had thought.

EnergyStar standards require power supplies are that no more than 80% efficient or better. This means that to be compliant, no more than 20% of the A/C power coming to your data center computer be converted to heat and lost before it even gets to the computing circuitry. This lost power is converted to heat before it ever gets to support actual computing.

This increases the arguments for Direct Current (DC) data centers. DC Data Centers convert Alternating Current (AC) power to DC before it is distributed to the servers. Telecommunications has longed used DC distribution for its big racks. There are several processes that can be improved by re-thinking power distribution in data centers around the principle of DC distribution.

All of that power lost by conversion is today heat lost in the data center. That heat must then be removed to keep the computing equipment sufficiently cool. Air conditioning is one of the most significant costs of a operating a data center. Many estimate that it takes up to 1.7 times as much energy to remove heat from conditioned space as the initial energy that generated the heat.

By simple moving the AC/DC conversion outside of the conditioned space of the data center, 20%-40% of the heat is moved out of the data center where it will not need to be air conditioned away.

Many reputable companies sell data center batteries to support uninterrupted power. These usually have AC converted to DC to charge batteries, with the same losses as above. The servers run off batteries. The batteries supply DC, which is converted to AC (5-15% loss of power as heat) to support the AC servers. The power supplies in the servers then convert the AC to DC (as above, with loss of power and generation of heat).

When people discuss the efficiency of this process, they usually describe the efficiency of the battery storage as the limiting factor. What the process above shows, however, that as much as half of the power stored may be lost as heat though the double conversion before it ever gets used for computing.

In a DC data center, the batteries still supply DC power, but all of it goes directly to the servers. Not only does this generate less heat, but it can as much as double the effective efficiency and life of the batteries by removing the double conversion for the last yard of distribution.

This increase of efficiency comes with today’s technologies, without waiting on the perfection of any novel or exotic battery technology.

It is hard to use the waste heat from Air Conditioning. A large AC/DC transformer, however, concentrates the energy lost as heat into one place. It is easy to harvest heat from a single very hot location. I have even seen proposals for fueling a steam distillation chiller off waste heat from a transformer to provide supplemental air conditioning for a data center. You could run domestic hot water heating off the external transformer. I suppose you could even hook a Stirling engine to the transformer and light the building using the waste heat.

We do not have to wait for exotic technologies, although they will come. We need to re-think processes with an awareness of power at each step. Transactive pricing for energy will encourage us to do just that.

A design firm came on to campus the other day to begin conversations on the new School of Information and Library Science (SILS). Library Science has been one of the more interesting areas of IT in the last few years, as they are positioning themselves as the side of Information Technology (IT) not concerned with the bits and bytes, nor with the collection of data, but with delivery of information.

The Art of the Librarian has always been about the delivery of the right information in the right format at the right time. Google delivers vast amounts of references at your fingertips, each information set and document only a click away. Little Billy in the second grade asks the school Librarian for a book about frogs and his handed a book with lots of pictures and small words. Nine years later, William, now taking AP Biology, asks the school Librarian for a book about frogs and gets an entirely different set of volumes. Librarians know that context determines the correct information.

The design firm knows a little something about its audience, and they presented a pitch that the project use new approaches based information stewardship. New approaches can be a difficult sell to someone who has one chance once to build a building. Even so, it seems to me the Information Stewardship is a good line to take with Librarians.

Information Stewardship appears include keeping all design information on-line and electronically readable. All commissioning information will also be kept on line. Making a statement that speaks to me, the firm also asked that they have access to live operating data for at least a year, to make sure that the building delivers the energy and performance goals that are specified in the design.

This last point is particularly important. One of the worst failings of first generation LEEDS Green Buildings was their long term performance. Platinum building performance was never verified. Innovative designed were never adequately explained to maintenance and operations personnel. At last, that nettlesome vibration is solved putting a brick on the damper. At last, that noise in the duct is blocked by shoving a file cabinet in front of the oversized return. A year after delivery, the performance is poor.

Regular readers will recognize the goals of this project as being similar to those of the National Building Information Model Standard (NBIMS), now known as buildSmart. It is interesting that the design firm professed no awareness of NBIMS, and in particular, no awareness of the Common Operations Building Information Exchange (COBIE) which specifies the hand-off of information from design and construction to operations.

SILS has recently begun offering concentrations in Bioinformatics. There is some discussion about adding a concentration in Business Informatics. Perhaps, with the aid of Building Information Stewardship, we can begin the development of Building Informatics. If so, this could be the missing piece in developing the abstractions needed to develop truly responsive buildings for the transacted energy grid.

Is anyone else as confused as I about the differences between Informatics, Infomatics, and Analytics? They seem to be used interchangeably, but in different conversations. Please post if you can define the distinctions.