Every consumer understands the concept and value of “plug-and-play” software that installs and configures itself for your device with a single click. Building controls and analytics software do not currently work that way—those types of software must be manually customized and installed for each building, creating significant drag on deployment.
Working with industry partners and professional associations like ASHRAE, DOE and national laboratories are developing an ecosystem of standards, open-source tools, example applications, and benchmarks to help advance the state-of-the-art in building control and to support the deployment of high-performance building controls at scale. The strategy builds on two complementary software standards.
The first, ASHRAE 223P “Semantic Modeling for Building Monitoring and Control Applications,” defines a schema for describing a building’s systems—equipment, plus relationships between pieces of equipment and between equipment and building spaces, sensors, and actuators. The presence of a building-specific semantic model allows building controls and analytics software to systematically “discover” the building systems and configure itself to them; it reduces the need for expensive, on-site “point-mapping” and application integration and configuration. Semantic modeling allows control logic written for a generic building and system to be automatically customized and configured to a specific building and system. Related DOE projects include BuildingMOTIF, Brick Schema, and Project Haystack/XETO.
Semantic modeling is conceptually independent from (orthogonal to) the language in which control logic is implemented. However, there are benefits to standardizing control logic representations as well. The second standard, ASHRAE 231P “Control Description Language (CDL),” does that by defining a portable representation of control logic that can be directly compiled for execution on commercial control platforms. CDL enables the centralized development of reference libraries, and its mathematical structure also facilitates customization from generic to specific buildings. The customization of reference library code is demonstrated in the ctrl-flow tool. The development of ASHRAE 231P is part of the larger OpenBuildingControl project.
Large commercial buildings have established hardware and software automation platforms. These platforms are often too expensive and cumbersome for the small commercial buildings, homes, and communities that have simpler yet more distributed control and monitoring needs. To support these contexts, DOE developed an open-source execution and messaging platform called VOLTTRON. All BTO-supported software uses permissive open-source licensing that allows public and private partners to build and distribute both open and proprietary products including products that contain modifications to the original code.
Finally, to help advance the state-of-the-art in control, BTO is developing BOPTEST, a standard benchmarking platform, and suites of test cases that allow new control strategies—both sequential and optimization-based—to be evaluated using standard metrics on a range of building types, system types, and climate zones. This same framework also allows universities and companies to train students and employees on virtual buildings that behave in physically realistic ways and that present standard control system interfaces.