ELECTRONICALLY REPRINTED FROM MAY 2012

Public interfaces
throughout the open ground
floor of the Wisconsin Institutes for
Discovery building draw from the systems integration
architecture to document building performance and resource use,
providing informational content to the general public and impacting the
behavior of building occupants. This interactive touchscreen tile wall is one of the
most prominent public and educational outreach technologies in the facility, renewing the
universitys century-old guiding principle of public benefit, The Wisconsin Idea. Courtesy: Affiliated Engineers Inc.

Systems integration benefits

Building operations are challenged by insufficient financial and human
resources and ever-expanding scopes of responsibility. Systems integration
and analytics are a means of doing more with less.
By Mike Walters, PE, LEED AP, Confluenc, Madison, Wis.; and
Paul Oswald, Environmental Systems Inc., Brookfield, Wis.

he past decade has seen dramatic

advances in automation systems and
smart devices. With todays IP-connected systems employing a variety of standard protocols and Web services, it is now
relatively simple to access and accumulate
data produced by devices in buildings. As a
consequence, the amount of available data
per building has grown, and with it in many

cases the number of buildings that have to

be managed. We find ourselves paradoxically drowning in oceans of data with little
or no information to work with.
The challenge facing todays overburdened managers and operations staffs is
information prioritization. The ideal targeted by todays systems integration professionals is to execute this prioritization

with little to no hands-on effort, devising

software to scan equipment systems patterns for variations and faults.
The industry has met each installment of
increasingly stringent ASHRAE 90.1 standardsdriven by volatile resource economies and urgent environmental imperativeswith additions to the arsenal of
automation and measurement technologies,

helping emerging low-energy technologies

enter the marketplace. The latest in systems
integration, demonstrated in a recent paradigm-changing research lab and elsewhere,
harnesses the analytics well depend on to
navigate the challenging waters ahead.
The challenge: Turn data into
actionable intelligence

From BAS to electric meters, thermostats, and individual sensors, a polyglot

assortment of smart devices are producing information about their environments
and operations. The first challenge is
how to bring all these data together in a
consistent manner, in other words, how
to normalize the data. Without this,
all we have are islands of information
that require manual intervention in order
to correlate data in one system with data
from another system. To avoid this considerable manual effort, prudent building managers are unifying the data into a
common, integrated architecture.
By using software and enabling digital control, BAS are superior to isolated
sensors (as well as the electromechanical
controls and manual collection of information they replace) for capturing and
storing huge amounts of data. Yet for all
their sophistication, they are both underused and ill-suited to provide pertinent
information, for example, conveying a
deteriorating condition in the operation
of a piece of equipment. Its not that data
arent therethe information usually is
but, again, finding everything is at best a
difficult and tedious task that is typically
beyond the capacity of most operators.
Meanwhile, these other data points in
systems that arent part of the BAS defy
inclusion with their own idiosyncratic
methods of capturing, storing, and looking at data, thus requiring more time,
more training, additional skills, or even
more staff. Consequently, the ability to
correlate this data and have it provide
meaningful information is all but lost.
The industrys acceptance of measurement and verification (M&V) has been
an important step toward highlighting
the value of enhancing the quality of data
provided to building managers. Harnessing the processing power of todays BAS

platforms to capture data, typical M&V

installations can provide trends and reporting to operations staff. However, due in
part to their lack of true analytics, many
M&V systems are relegated to providing
basic, high-level information about energy
performance on building dashboards.
Building managers are increasingly
turning to open source systems integration (SI) platforms to manage their
operations. These platforms build from
the best available control and automation
technologies, can easily provide data and
information required for M&V functionality, and deploy a suite of analytics applications that can identify items requiring
attention in real time.
Individual, functionally intense building projects present some of the most
complex challenges to designing analytics. Portfolios of multiple less complex
buildings being considered simultaneously, possibly in campus environments, can
present similar challenges. Ensuring that
analytics from each buildings BAS are
comparable is an important initial step.
When building control systems are
implemented, control sequences are
written based on a best understanding
of the building and equipment systems,
past experience, assumptions, and the
information available at the time. While
these control sequences often incorporate feedback loops, the only feedback
they respond to is the value of the variable
they are attempting to control. Verifying
that these sequences are working correctly, continue to operate as expected,
and havent been interfered with or overridden by human operators is a common
problemessentially an impossible task
for building personnel to manage. There
is too much data, and the equipment and
systems are too complex, particularly in
highly integrated buildings. Given that
almost all buildings are different and that
fewer people are available with the necessary knowledge of systems, its understandable that buildings rarely operate at
maximum efficiency.
To accomplish this requires f irst
addressing the differences in the building systems themselves; each has its
own methods and limits for data collec-

tion, storage, and reporting, and its own

method for setup and programming. An
additional concern for multibuilding and
multisite users is providing an ability to
assess the enterprise. Surveying a diverse
array of systems in multiple buildings so
that data can be compared for benchmarking, identifying best practices, and
correlating the building information
with business information provide a better understanding of costs and potential
improvements in efficiency, sustainability, and performance.
Once the data are normalized, the
next step is to use analytics to transform
data into information. Much more than
just a report generator or a way to provide multiple views of the data, analytics allows domain experts to capture
their knowledge in rules that automatically run against the data. Employing semantic tagging, pattern recognition, functional rules processing, and
other techniques, the analytics engine can
automatically identify issues worthy of
attention. This provides the capability to
show users what they need to know about
the performance of their systems and to
unlock the data so meaningful action
can be taken to reduce cost and improve
efficiency, sustaining financially viable
operation.
Examples of these analytics include
failure detection (sensors), efficiency
monitoring (economizers), cost correlation, and consumption or operating
profiles that compare utility costs to
production output under specific conditions, time ranges, rate values, and
weather parameters. With the proper
domain knowledge, virtually anything
can be captured in an analytics rule in
order to become the eyes and ears of
the systems and ensure performance. Furthermore, attaching a cost impact to rules
associated with failures or efficiency provides a method to prioritize actions based
on actual cost impact to the business,
rather than merely reporting frequency
and duration of the issue.
With this richness of information,
building management and operations
staff can prioritize their activities and
use their limited operating budgets and

With this richness of information, building management

and operations staff can prioritize their activities.
human resources to methodically address
building issues that are the most important (i.e., the most expensive to ignore).
Using SI-based analytics

As a global standard-setting biomedical research center, the 300,000-sq-ft

Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery (WID)
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
represents state-of-the-art and state-ofthe-future strategies for implementing
and benefiting from SI-based analytics.
In operation since December 2010, this
highly complex facility supports interwoven institutional, organizational, edu-

cational, environmental, and social goals

in addition to two research entities, one
public and one private.
The present function and future potential of the WID facility are dependent on
the engineered systems supporting its
program of interdisciplinary collaboration. The various lab requirements are
specific to cellular and molecular biology, biochemistry, organic synthesis,
genetics, chemical engineering, computational modeling, bioinformatics, and
biomedical engineering. On the principle
that breakthroughs are found in the constantly evolving confluences of otherwise

The three broad system categories of building systems, scientific systems, and
AV/communications are comprised of many subsystems often using unique
communications protocols. The WID building leverages an intelligent building
architecture server to unify these diverse systems. The Niagara Framework software platform was used to create the integration backbone. Courtesy: Affiliated
Engineers Inc.

discrete disciplinesand with a mission

of accelerating new knowledge improving human health and well-beingthe
lab spaces are readily reconfigurable.
The facility as a whole is designed to
accommodate the unknown technologies and research methodologies of the
future, to the extent of a viable 100-year
lifespan. The degree to which the facility
can learn from itself, providing feedback
to operators and users alike, allows it to
anticipate and adapt to change. This is a
vital priority, with analytics at the heart
of the mission-driven, mission-driving
building concept.
The building technologies required to
meet the unique goals of the project were
necessarily advanced and often inherently complex, as compared with most
commercial building systems. The multifaceted nature of the architectural spacesincluding large-volume atriums and
restaurants open to the public, biological
and chemical laboratories dedicated to
academic research, undergraduate teaching laboratories, and high-tech conference and event spacerequired tailored
solutions for such systems as HVAC,
lighting, life safety, access control, and
scientific processes. This high degree to
which systems were customized to various spaces created a demand for specific
control and automation technologies.
In addition to its functional requirements, WID, from its earliest conception, was planned to be aggressively
energy-efficient and sustainable, with
a 50% reduction in CO2 emissions and
a 50% reduction in water use, relative
to similar research buildings. Technologies and strategies to reduce energy consumption include exhaust heat recovery,
chilled beam, LED task lighting, daylight harvesting, ground source heat
exchange, geothermal heat pumps, and
solar generation of domestic hot water.
Throughout the open ground floor of
WID are public interfaces documenting building performance, alongside
displays of research taking place in the
building. These components demonstrate the public and educational out-

In some cases the normalization effort can eliminate the need for
multiple proprietary software packages.
reach commitments of The Wisconsin
Idea, the universitys century-old guiding principle that it should improve the
lives of people beyond the classroom.
A robust M&V system was envisioned
to achieve these public interfaces.
However, as the project developed, the
concept of public interfaces evolved
to include resource use displays (e.g.,
energy, water) in a manner that could
be educational to the general public
and regular building occupants and,
importantly, impact the behaviors of the
building occupants. Additionally, project leadership sought to ensure that the
high-performance energy goals would be
continuously achieved over the lifecycle
of the building. As such, a significantly
more refined measurement, control, and
verification system was identified as a
critical component of the projects longterm success. This took the form of an
intelligent building architecture, or IBA.
The IBA is the chassis upon which
systems integration is achieved, effectively aggregating data from the complete cross-section of automation and
control subsystems and devices deployed
throughout the facility. As illustrated in
the systems integration architecture diagram, the WID systems use technologies
and protocols including BACnet, Internet protocol (IP), transmission control
protocol (TCP), simple network management protocol (SNMP), Modbus, Ethernet, and various automation protocols for
programmable logic controllers (PLC).
While several options exist to create an
IBA, the WID project used the Niagara
Framework software platform to create
the integration backbone. The Niagara
Framework provides the connectivity
to the various subsystems and devices,
normalizes the data and resolves tagging and modeling issues with the various systems, and provides the glue
logic to tie the data together and perform control across the boundaries of
the individual systems and devices. The
selected software was used to directly
control/monitor domestic water meters,
natural gas meters, solar hot water

Project Haystack

ne of the biggest challenges to integrating data and applying the subsequent combined dataset to advanced applications is data modeling. Data modeling ensures that
the data being analyzed and reported on is correct and applicable for the analysis being
performed. Lacking any standards for data modeling, naming, and tagging, an industry initiative is underway to address this problem.
Project Haystack is an open source initiative to develop naming conventions and taxonomies for
building equipment and operational data. It defines standardized data models for sites, equipment,
and points related to energy, HVAC, lighting, and other environmental systems.
Today most operational data requires a manual, labor-intensive process to map the data before
any analytics can begin. Pragmatic use of naming conventions and taxonomies can improve the
cost-effectiveness of performing analytics, deriving greater value from operational data.

system components, laboratory equipment, public water features, laboratory

gas bulk tanks, and laboratory process
chilled water meters.
The software platform is agnostic to
control protocol or manufacturer, and
therefore readily integrates the diverse
devices and communication protocols
throughout the building. The IBA uses
this fully open, Web-based protocol so
that all information and graphics are
accessible through conventional Web
browsers, thus no proprietary software
was required to be installed on any user
workstations. The IBA and its Web interfaces facilitate user friendly management
and real-time control of the building systems. Regardless of the technology used,
some challenges to providing an integrated architecture still remain. Coordination
with all the subsystem suppliers is critical; changes they make need to be communicated to the team to minimize impact
to schedule and effort. Another very fundamental yet often overlooked consideration is to ensure a clear and common
understanding among the various audiences for the information, making sure
that the information and its presentation
serves the needs of all audiences and is
tailored to their respective uses and levels of understanding. While this is critical
for all projects, it was amplified at WID
because of the diverse types and needs
of the audiences, including biomedical
researchers, building operators, public
visitors of all ages, and building engineering researchers. Each of these groups

has different needs regarding the information, ranging from basic education to
detailed historical analysis.
Building user benefits: Once the IBA
system was developed, the projects goal
of instilling occupants awareness of
their own usage patterns could be initiated. In terms of energy consumption in
the WID facility, scientific researchers
are a critical building occupant group.
Using the IBA to monitor receptacle
load, lighting status, supply and exhaust
air flows, supply air reheat coil inlet
and outlet temperatures (via integrated
laboratory controls vendor interface),
and supplemental cooling using chilled
beams, a complete space-level energy
consumption profile is developed for
each laboratory area of the building
(referred to as a pod). Energy information is provided to occupants via
displays indicating energy consumption
factors totalized and trended for the past
day, week, month, and year. In addition
to tracking information on their space
and equipment, researchers can receive
notification of equipment alarms indicating circumstances possibly affecting
their work.
Building operator benefits: Normalizing the information means the operators have a consistent method to view
and interact with real-time information,
alarms, schedules, and histories. This
relieves the burden of having to master
multiple software interfaces and techniques for something as simple as, say,
changing a time-of-day schedule that

Numerous studies have shown that it is not uncommon to find 50% of economizers
in rooftop applications to be nonfunctional or not functioning properly.
affects multiple systems (HVAC, lighting, etc.). In some cases the normalization
effort can eliminate the need for multiple
proprietary software packages that require
user training, initial capital expenditures,
and annual licensing fees resulting in savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
General public benefits: As an educational facility where the public is invited to
learn about the research being conducted,
the building and its information are also on
display to the public. Here the IBA combines real-time operating data, historical
consumption data, and educational graphics
about the systems in the building to facilitate a visitors understanding of how the
building works and how it is performing.
Building engineering researchers
benefits: Building engineering researchers see the benefit in IBA because it provides them with greater access to data.
This group, unlike the other audiences, is
not interested in graphics or dashboards.
They want the ability to find data, oftentimes from disparate systems, and to do
so quickly and efficiently. IBA allows
them to do that without the need to learn
multiple system interfaces and provides
ready access to the data they need to support their research.
Systems integration and analytics

The WID project represents a uniquely

complex facility with demanding performance standards prescribed from its
earliest inception. In these respects the
application of analytics and system integration were immediate to the program
of the facility. Appreciable benefits can
also be achieved in facilitiesor across a
facility portfolioof less complexity, but

of greater scale. Foremost is the potential

for significant energy and operational
savings offered by the combination of an
integrated architecture and a rich analytics
platform. The key to unlocking this potential lies in being able to identify where the
opportunities are. Several recent strategies
offer representative approaches to leveraging SI and analytics, specific to users
unique operations.
Energy management: Establishing
accurate target setpoints for energy consumption is a key part of most energy efficiency projects, whether it is a lighting retrofit or replacement of HVAC equipment.
For example, finding periods of time that
deviate from desired operation resulted
in the corrective action of establishing
demand reduction sequences via analytics, producing a lower energy consumption
profile and annual savings of $1.4 million
across 420 sites, totaling 33 million sq ft.
Continuous, automated oversight notifies
operators of deviations from the desired
energy baseline, enabling real-time investigation and corrective action if necessary.
Maintenance and operations: Nonfunctioning sensors and actuators result in
significant energy waste, occupant discomfort, equipment wear and tear, and process
inefficiency. Whats worse, for all their
potential value, many devices arent working and nobody knows it. Numerous studies
have shown that it is not uncommon to find
50% of economizers in rooftop applications
to be nonfunctional or not functioning properly. These conditions can go unnoticed
indefinitely if their discovery depends on
looking at every trend log to identify a
value, condition, or pattern, an approach
obviated by a targeted analytics platform.

In this way, one operator identified lighting and HVAC equipment left in manual
override, resulting in operating procedure
changes and control sequence modifications yielding $650,000 in annual savings
across 165 sites. Another used detection of
failed sensors and economizers to prioritize
work orders, providing $800,000 in annual
operation and maintenance savings across
128 sites totaling 23 million sq ft.
Improving efficiency: Achieving
desired comfort conditions while using the
lowest amount of energy possible is subject
to the complexities of program and locale.
And watching the operating characteristics
of all systems and their interaction with one
another in real time is impossible to do
manually. By first integrating the data from
various systems together into one architecture and then applying rules through an analytics application, it is possible to achieve
significant energy savings and improve
comfort. One operator identified periods of
time when cooling and heating were operating simultaneously, and when outside air
(above the minimum required) was being
brought in during heating mode, changed
control sequences and realized savings of
more than $325,000 annually across 67
sites.
Walters is a principal with the energy
planning firm Confluenc. Formerly director of Affiliated Engineers sustainability
practice, Walters led the energy-efficiency
strategies for WID. Oswald is president
of Environmental Systems Inc. (ESI).
ESI provides solutions for automation,
systems integration, security, life safety,
advanced software applications, energy
services, and building operations.

Posted with permission from May 2012. Consulting-Specifying Engineer, CFE Media. Copyright 2012. All rights reserved.
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