Digital Twin Morphing to Triplets and the New Wireless Wave

The theme of our April issue of AutomatedBuildings.com is Adaptation. The issue includes several articles discussing the new wireless wave which is now hitting us with low cost, easily deployed services/devices.

Hopefully, we prepared you for some of this in our last Chapter "Adaptation" (here’s the LinkedIn post).

In this article, Is there a need for Digital Triplets? Quadruplets? Siblings even? Nicolas Waern makes some great points:

How can we adapt to a world that was, that is, and will be? How can we adapt to a future that is unknown? Can we make it known by utilizing the concept of Digital Twins, and go Beyond Buildings? Can we simulate the future, having done thousands of AI-driven simulations, and bring the solutions back to the now, knowing what the future will look like?

Knowing that the future is already here, only unevenly distributed. I have made it my mission to find the tools that can distribute the future to the ones that want it the most. Digital Twins are quite in the hype for now so thought I could stir up some noise even more with Digital Triplets.

What started off as a joke, soon became reality in a couple of conversations with partners and vendors last week. I talked to legends in the Power industry having written articles about Triplets a year ago exactly. It came up in discussions with industrial automation professionals regarding simulation capabilities. I mentioned 6G, 7G, or 8G and Digital Triplets in a webinar last week to make a point that we need to talk more about the jobs to be done, instead of the buzzword bingo right now.

The need to adapt to existing ways of working was also discussed in a webinar [i] for Chalmers University and The Digital Twin City Centre, about Revenue Models and Business Models. The importance of understanding the concept, the situation, and the unique problems that should be solved cannot be emphasized enough, where existing companies are indeed built to die.

Finding inspiration is not the challenge. That is just a google away. Finding what problems to solve, and how to solve them in their unique setting with culture, processes, people, existing systems, and political agendas can only be discovered by digging into the reality that exists. It is known that Digital Twins can accelerate digital transformation efforts. But a lot of the real use cases are yet to be discovered at scale.  But what are the main parts that Digital Twins are made up of?

Memoori asks Is the Path to the Digital Twin Future of Buildings Paved By APIs?  Key quote (and working definition):

A digital twin is a digital representation of a real-world entity or system. In the context of a building, digital twins express the location and characteristics of every wall, door, and window, but also every pipe, cable, and switch in a virtual model. In our increasingly smart buildings, digital twins must also mirror every system, device, and connection to truly represent the facility.

Buildings are not static entities, however, so to maintain an accurate digital twin the system must also monitor wear, tear, and repair, and realize every modification or upgrade, in the digital model. With many traditional assets and an estimated 1.7 billion connected sensors and endpoints in commercial buildings in 2020, the digital twin has its work cut out.

According to the tech research firm Gartner, 75% of organizations implementing Internet of Things (IoT) technologies already use some form of digital twin or plan to within a year.

Here is the second instalment of a three-part series from Troy Harvey, CEO PassiveLogic, Quantum Digital Twins — from system topologies to AI:

The evolution of building and IoT automation is placing a strain on the demands of installers, engineers, and manufacturers of equipment. Growing customer requirements, and the fast moving technology interplays between buildings, occupants, energy, and the business processes within these structures, are adding to already overburdened requirements on automation systems.

We as an industry need to come to grips with the fact that building systems are the world’s most complex automated systems. Once we do that, we can then address our systemic problems. Even the smallest buildings easily have thousands of I/O points — or what we’d call degrees of freedom in robotic analysis. In large buildings the I/O points can exceed hundreds of thousands, and with the growth of the IoT industry, the complexity is only growing. Only once we give buildings their due respect against comparative cyberphysical systems like autonomous vehicles, Mars rovers, or industrial robotics, can we start the conversation on what we do to address the complexity.

In addition to managing this rising system complexity and evolving customer demand, there is exponential growth in the diversity of applications and use cases We are exhausting our tools with workarounds  to solve this exploding complexity. We are asked to model not only the HVAC systems, but the architectural and engineering workflow. We need more than tags, more that labels, more than interconnections. We need not only to describe hydronic and air flows between mechanical equipment, but the data flow within and between IT and IoT systems. We need to connect not only the building systems to the structural elements, but also the interconnected business systems within — whether that is the processes of occupants, logistics, manufacturing, energy, or any of the myriad services we are currently being asked to integrate with the building.

If you are starting to adapt to twin and triplet thinking, keep your eyes open for the next big upsetting wave, the wireless wave washing over new IoT ways, reaching to every known enlisted building component with its descriptions, purpose, address, dynamic location, and sharable data providing rapidly deployable adaptation with automatic network creation and self-discovery.

In this article, The Only Constant is Change, Phillip Kopp, CEO Conectric Networks, talks about how virtual reality is just not quite the same as the real deal: 

Humans are very good at adapting and that is likely an underlying reason for our success as a species so far. But what about our assets? All of the physical systems we have designed to help us in our quest to survive in our dynamic Earth home and propagate out into the rest of the Universe. In particular, those buildings we have developed in order to live in all types of conditions and climates around the world (and space… in the not-so-distant future).

Arguably one of the oldest and most important adaptation tools in our inventory. Are our buildings adaptable to the constant change? What if the environment they were built to endure changes around them? What if the end-use they were designed for is no longer relevant? Just for example, all those giant convention facilities and office buildings that have been empty for over the last year. These are very important questions for the owners, operators and users of those very costly assets.

...Let’s look first into the structural component of how our buildings will need to adopt to these new paradigms. It is not only possible, but necessary to rethink how we design and build in the future to make our structures more adaptable and resilient to changing conditions. However, the reality is that our entire industry is not well suited to this kind of sudden, major change either. This begs a kind of reengineering of the entire industry stack. From how stakeholders like engineers, architects, technicians, builders and consultants are trained and deployed, to how buildings are financed and later operated.

Building a structure to meet a specific end use makes it inherently inflexible. This can be closely tied to local zoning ordinances and master planning that require certain types of structures to be built in certain areas. The expected use of an asset over its life facilitates financing its development. But what if needs change so dramatically that a once a busy shopping mall dies, and must be repurposed as a corporate office campus or a multi-family complex?

With cities in drastic need to build resilience to extreme weather and public health or safety crisis, it’s very likely we will see a rethinking of these zoning systems in the coming future to facilitate new kinds of multi-purpose buildings. And with those buildings, a new kind of construction process which de-emphasizes the importance of any particular stakeholder during early construction and adds much more value in providing ongoing services to these adaptable structures, which may be in constant change over their entire useful life. This is a fundamental shift in the distribution of resources across an entire industry, including how buildings will be owned and operated.

In this interview I talk with Don Kasper, VP of Strategy and Business Development at Sentient Buildings, a New York-based software company and master systems integrator:

Sinclair: You mentioned both adaptability and GEB buildings which caught my attention. Can you explain further?

Kasper: Our vision is to be the data manager in buildings and act as a broker of sorts to different systems. We can enable simple "If This, Then That" controls in buildings by connecting all of the various data-producing systems at the building level but also at the market level so simple interactivity can be achieved without impacting the existing controls a building.

We've spent a lot of time thinking and creating our Neuro platform to help future-proof buildings and make them smarter. Another key feature of Neuro is that it has a simple but complex user management system that allows us building owners to provision access to data to any vendor or platform through our API.

This user management system means that a building owner can give access to a specific device, type of data point, or any system or sub-system in the building. As an example, sub-meter data can be shared with a tenant billing company and chilled water data can be shared separately with an energy services company without having to repeat the data collection process. This makes buildings highly adaptable since there is one source of data that can be provisioned at any level to 3rd party companies.

How this applies to GEB is that we can broker data between a demand response company and allow them to increase thermostats by 2 degrees through fleet management in anticipation of a demand response event.

This article on Low-cost Asset Tracking from Spotto’s Jim Henry suggests we give every asset an IP address: 

Our goal is to make asset tracking easy, cost effective, targeted and timely so that organisations can find their assets when they need them. A key advantage of this simple proposition is that organisations can reduce costs by avoiding unnecessary duplication of assets, preventing assets being lost (for instance by being left in the wrong place) and minimising workplace conflict due to frustrations associated with the ‘disappearance’ of shared assets.

In 2001 ripples of these waves were starting In this building automation column I wrote, The Componentization Era is Coming Here!

The next phase of building automation technology will bring new life to some traditional equipment. Likewise, it will usher in a rethinking of what building HVAC systems do, and how they do it.  These insights from our building automation columnist can help you get a running start on the new wave of controls

Here are some of the advantages created by the componentization trend:

• Overall lower cost because the controls necessary for the safety and operation of HVAC subsystems will be combined with the building-wide control devices. 
• Shared points for safety and operation will be available for building performance monitoring, eliminating the duplication of these points. (For example, the chilled-water supply and return temperatures on a chiller). 
• Shared input information to component control will allow points to be added to the overall system that would not normally be economical to include. Example: power usage of a chiller. This information is necessary for capacity control but could also turn the chiller into its own energy meter. 
• The ability to add increased functionality for an extremely low cost is inherent in component control. The custom-designed controller can have the DDC hardware configuration closely matched to the actual requirements of the HVAC subsystem.
• Closer integration of control in the HVAC equipment can occur through sensors that can be made an integral part of the device by imbedding them in locations not available to field installations. 
• Self-tuning control algorithms will be more successful because timing and tuning parameters can be set for the particular device. Time constants and control characteristics are predictable within the actual device. Factory performance simulation will provide proof of the actual ability of the control to self-tune under any conditions. 
• The fact that this same component control will be used on all manufactured devices will allow the manufacturer the time to closely match correct control for his equipment. 
• Self-diagnostics will be very sophisticated and an integral part of each manufactured device. Using appliance-type thinking and assembly line construction, the component control will be a large part of the quality assurance effort, providing its own device original and continuous performance evaluation. The low cost to add the necessary sensing and functionality to make sophisticated self-diagnostics is achievable and will become the lowest cost of providing original and ongoing product quality assurance. 
• Increased HVAC product functionality will continue to grow as new control concepts are developed daily

Here in Episode 395 of ControlTalk we talk about the April issue and digital triplets. Key Quote: 

As our mediums of communication evolve, the reach of our voice moves from local, to national, to global, from workspace to everywhere. We need to be the change, disconnecting from our learned perceptions — hone our superpowers.  

A good summary on the state of the industry can be read in this article, Connected Complexity from Harbor Research: 

We are at the cusp of a “perfect storm” of smart systems innovations. Multiple parallel technology developments, including data modeling and machine learning, are accelerating and enabling more complex and adaptive systems such as digital twins.

Along with the value these innovations bring, however, grows the complexity of connecting and integrating machines, equipment and data in a meaningful context. A new open-source software tool, Connection Profile, enables simple, durable and context-sensitive integration between complex systems without any wasteful custom development. It is a great leap forward to the original vision of the internet as a single, seamlessly integrated cloud.

Digital Triplets? Quadruplets? Componetized Wireless? Adaptation is in your future.