Establishing a Smart Building Industry Standard Establishing a Smart Building Industry Standard 801.394.3344 • 2040 Murray Holladay Rd., Suite 300, Holladay, Ut, 84117 Establishing a Smart Building Industry Standard Key points • Current buildings are more Establishing a Smart Building Industry Standard Why Vocabulary Matters connected than smart Written by: Troy Harvey, CEO The term “Smart Building” has been in use since at least the 1990s, coined to How can we as an industry provide 09/19/2019 • Techisadvancingpast reference something “more” than just automation. It emerged from the “Smart” clarity, chart a path to the future, established industry Originally posted on Automated Buildings lexicon — smartphone, smart home, smart grid, smart cities — invoked when a and distinguish between vocabulary http://automatedbuildings.com/news/sep19/articles/ product is more Fourth Industrial Revolution than First. technological architectures while passivelogic/190829111606passivelogic.html also communicating on a mutually • Autonomous vehicle Our industry — automation — was conceived of this First Industrial Revolution standards can serve as the understood foundation with our legacy. The basic control loop, typified by the mercury switch thermostat, still basis for autonomous We all spend the first hour of a meeting establishing what we mean by smart, customers, investors, and the lives on as an emblem of the ingenuity of this early 19th-century paradigm shift. building standards how smart is smart, navigating disbelief, educating about new technology, and public? In fact, the senior statesmen of our industry — Honeywell, Siemens, Johnson, finally arriving at common ground. • Aconsensuson and Schneider — were all born out of this early era. I have a proposal. autonomous building There is a better way. vocabulary will pave a clear But as our industry transitions to a diverse world of autonomous systems, AI, path for future technologies. The problem with today’s “smart buildings” is they’re not actually smart. and distributed IoT — new terminology is required. As anyone operating in the At best, they are merely “connected.” Of course, we all know this to be true, but space of “smarter” systems can attest,the building automation industry’s as an industry, we lack the vocabulary to distinguish how smart “smart” is, and lackofaclearlexiconisbecomingabarriertocommunication. thus, we lean on ambiguous terminology. This presents a serious problem as We spend the first hour of a meeting establishing what we mean by smart, we chart the path from the First Industrial Revolution legacy to our inevitable how smart is smart, navigating disbelief, educating about new technology, future arrival at fully autonomous building systems. and finally arriving at common ground. 1 2 Establishing a Smart Building Industry Standard 801.394.3344 • 2040 Murray Holladay Rd., Suite 300, Holladay, Ut, 84117 Autonomous Buildings This future-forward control is Why do autonomous buildings uniquely possible because What are autonomous buildings? matter? buildings have accurate prediction Market Comparison Level 8 Fullyautonomousbuildingsactasreal-timeagents Just like autonomous vehicles are Buildings are the largest controlled Peer-To-Peer Interactive in smart city networks horizons of many hours, or even the pinnacle in the automated infrastructure in the world economy. days, in contrast to the mere vehicle standard taxonomy, fully They are also the most complex. A Level 7 Self-commissioning and self-validating of system seconds that vehicle systems have autonomous buildings are the end- typical commercial building has Self Commissioning interconnection, automates point mapping. to work with. point of the “smart building” thousands of sensors and hundreds revolution. Like autonomous Perhaps, most importantly, of control points. When we add in Using introspection can guide the installer through the MACHINE INTERACTION Level 6 complex dynamics like occupancy, Self-Guided Install installation process. vehicles, these next-generation autonomous buildings cooperate. buildings “navigate” in real-time. Because buildings are the primary weather, and equipment variance, a simple state analysis shows that the FULLY SELF DRIVING Level 5 FULL AUTONOMOUS BUILDINGS Only instead of navigating a single building-blocks of cities, you 2D Route Finding · 1-System Full Autonomy n-D Route Finding · n-Systems car in a 2D spatial map, obviously can’t have smart cities typical building has trillions of autonomous buildings navigate a without having truly smart buildings. possible states. This is well beyond the complexity of other industries, Level 4 The building control uses continuous paths. Sequences whole “fleet” of sub-systems Autonomousbuildingswillact High Automation Real-Time Sequences are generated in real-time, at the edge. simultaneously in a multi- as agents in energy networks, and beyond the limits of today’s dimensional temporal map. buying and selling energy futures static approach, based on forms of The system can adapt its control sequences during Finite Automata — which rely on MACHINE MONITORING Level 3 Conditional Automation using smart contracts, working with Adaptive Sequences operation. sequence programming, PIDs, and “Perhaps, most importantly, utilities and district systems, and set points. autonomous buildings ultimately building the backbone Level 2 The control system assists in generating the system Partial Automation cooperate.“ for future peer-to-peer grids. Sequence Generation Assist sequences. The sequences are still static. Level 1 Adaptively adjusts set points of otherwise static Fully autonomous buildings Adaptive Cruise Control Adaptive Set-Points manual sequences develop their own control sequences on the fly in response to HUMAN MONITORING Level 0 changing conditions. They’re not Cruise Control Conventional set-point or proportional control Set-Points/Thermostatics based on static sequences, set- points, PID, or simple state machines. They understand their Autonomous Vehicles Standard own underlying physics of Other industries have faced this before, and we can borrow from their success. operation and generate continuous Foreseeing a similar challenge, the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) control paths. They can introspect those same physics and provide “Weinthebuilding came together in 2014 to establish a common taxonomy and terminology for autonomous driving systems. This standard charted the course from deep insights, analytics, or more controls industry don’t have conventional First Industrial Revolution vehicle technology to the future of fully importantly — analysis. This analysis to reinvent the wheel. autonomous vehicles — with defined thresholds for each level of autonomy, can, in turn, be used to automate from level 0 to level 5. With clear definitions charting a technological path the commissioning and optimization of systems. Fully In fact, the future of forward, the autonomous vehicles market has thrived with technological development, architectural evolution, customer identity, market investment, autonomous building systems are autonomous buildings looks and cultural speculation. aware of the future implications of more similar to autonomous their control decisions, enabling Weinthebuildingcontrolsindustrydon’thavetoreinventthewheel. them to navigate around system vehicles than different” In fact, the future of autonomous buildings looks more similar to autonomous “collisions” or energy “congestion” vehicles than different, and much of their existing taxonomy applies to the hours before it even occurs. building industry. 3 4 Establishing a Smart Building Industry Standard 801.394.3344 • 2040 Murray Holladay Rd., Suite 300, Holladay, Ut, 84117 Taxonomy for Smart Buildings PassiveLogic’s Technology Leadership possibility of reaching any farther than level 1 autonomy We propose starting with 6 levels of autonomy that are orthogonal to the SAE because the foundational models of the past 100 years Autonomy is the future for all controlled systems, Autonomous Vehicles Standard. In addition to this base set, we propose adding are incapable of accurately modeling the extremely including vehicles, industrial processes, buildings, and 3 more levels to account for the greater levels of autonomy buildings can complicated state-spaces of buildings. We can tack on a many more. The technology to get us to fully autonomous achieve due to the fact that their control and automation systems are site cloud solution or analytics platform to make small buildings is available today, but can only be implemented assembled, not limited by the factory constructed uniformity of cars. These improvements, but it is not the path that can ultimately 6 Self-Guided install depending on how we choose to manage the 100 year- additional 3 levels account for systems that guide their own installation (i.e. self- lead to full autonomy. This level utilizes the underlying old relic tech that still serves as the foundation of our assembling), self-commissioning systems, and self-networking systems. intelligence of Level-5 autonomy, industry. PassiveLogic enables the inevitable future of truly Our proposed taxonomy — including and the introspection of its own autonomous buildings by establishing a new foundation The simple fact of the matter is this: the autonomous levels 6–8 that go beyond the physics and interconnectivity, to based on deep digital twins — a model that is fully Adaptive sequences future cannot be achieved on the outdated foundation of Autonomous Vehicles Standard