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May / June 2017 ELECTRICAL LINE
empower many stakeholders, including building owners,
energy managers, service technicians, utility providers, and,
let’s not forget the most important, the building occupants. In
different ways, these stakeholders will achieve greater insight
into their buildings.
Yet the IoT does not end with conveying information
through data visualization. Its Ecosystem includes web-based
control and automation, empowering us to use our new
insights and take action. We can quickly apply our knowledge
to optimize building performance. This could be
streamlining operations and maintenance (O&M) or reducing
energy costs, all the while improving occupant satisfaction.
The combination of data transparency and web-based control
and automation will reshape our industry’s relationships. Building
managers will collaborate with service technicians to proactively
optimize equipment performance. Manufacturers will
enhance the customer experience by troubleshooting their
equipment’s faults real-time as well as inform future product
development. These new relationships will disrupt how the BAS
industry does business. As we have seen in the software-IT
industries, we will start to shift toward a BAS-as-a-Service but
we will have to come up with a better acronym than BASAAS.
Reshaping The Building Automation Industry
Compared to other industries that are just starting to be disrupted
by the IoT, the BAS industry has a head start. Embedding
web connectivity within building equipment is nothing
new. Yet, what will be new is how the IoT Ecosystem will
reduce the cost to connect to more devices and sensors, especially
over wireless communication protocols (e.g., WiFi, ZigBee).
It will also foster greater interoperability between BAS
platforms and enterprise solutions using frameworks championed
by the software-IT industries such as Advanced Programming
Interfaces (APIs). In fact, of all the ecosystem segments
in Figure 1, we perceive ‘Interoperability’ to be the largest disruption,
moving our industry away from its proprietary habits.
Building performance has been inhibited by proprietary control
systems that, while robust and reliable, seek to ‘stay the
course’. Consequently, our buildings are limited to the capabilities
within a vendor’s platform, preventing BAS implementers
and third-party developers from adding features. This closed
culture results in an expensive BAS product that is not fully
customized for the building’s unique needs. Moreover, the control
system is stagnant, demanding a hefty price to update
toward future improvements. Compare this paradigm to how
extensible smart phones and most software applications are.
Here both original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and thirdparty
developers are continually making improvements. Does
our industry really need to be so out of touch with this reality?
We believe that answer is ‘no’. And the way we will catch
up is through the IoT Ecosystem.
We started moving toward greater interoperability when
our industry adopted the LonWorks® and BACnet® open
protocols in the 1990s. The next major step toward greater
interoperability was in 1999 when Tridium launched the
Niagara Framework®. Developed by an entrepreneurial
group of building industry experts, electrical engineers and
computer scientists, Niagara is an Internet protocol (IP)
based controls platform using JAVA, an open programming
35
language popular with the software-IT industries. It includes
software drivers that can work with various proprietary BAS
platforms and hardware. Compared to the proprietary programming
languages used by the incumbent BAS providers,
Tridium developers could hit the ground running, programming
in the JAVA language while quickly connecting to third
party devices over pre-built drivers.
The next significant step towards interoperability was in
2006 with the release of the Open Building Information
Exchange (oBIX) guideline that looked to foster interoperability
between BAS and enterprise solutions. Enterprise
solutions include human resources, finance, customer relationship
management (CRM) systems, and manufacturing.
oBIX represented a unique collaboration between the BAS
and software-IT industries. The technical committee that
developed oBIX – a part of the OASIS organization -
included the Tridium company as well as the software-IT
companies IBM and Cisco. We will see this cross-industry
collaboration become more common, especially as corporations
with national building portfolios are starting to realize
the benefits of having multiple enterprise applications,
including BAS and Energy Management Information System
(EMIS) functionality, converge within a fully integrated
Business Intelligence (BI) solution.
The latest step toward interoperability occurred in 2009
when Tridium created an open-source platform called Sedona
“to speed the development of smart, networked devices”
(Frank 2011). Under its open-source license, the source code
is publicly available and can be utilized by any company.
Much like other open-source software (OSS) initiatives,
Sedona has an open-source community where non-affiliated
developers collaborate to augment the platform with new features
such as libraries of pre-developed code for different
building system applications.
In the following sections, we delve further into how this
BAS to software-IT industry collaboration will occur
within each IoT segment. In some cases, our industry won’t
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