BuildingServicePerformance: Charter

Mission

"Building Service Performance" is an Ontolog project to formalize how we describe services performed in the built environment.

Primary Problems to Resolve

• Conversations between industry specialists often break down in semantic frustration because of many reasons. A primary reason is the lack of a common framework and the recognition of how to evolve this framework.

• Documentation of building elements and building performance has exploded. Which parts of the living documents need to comply with long term exchange requirements for wide spread re-use?

Purpose (~ Goals and Objectives)

• Discuss practical issues and strategies for developing informal business ontologies into usable and useful formal "Service Performance Level" ontologies.
  • Define the concepts in non-technical as well as technical terms
  • Work closely with members of related forums such as emergency response planning, device information exchange, Owner-Architect-Contractors, and Energy-Green Building communities.
  • Identify specific and general audiences (aka "clients") for the results of these discussions
• Identify ontological engineering and management approaches relevant to domains within the Architectural, Engineering, Construction, Operations, and Recommissioning industries.
  • Fit these ontologies into existing Official roadmaps at the international, national, regional, and local levels and the key boundaries that need to be bridged. Utilize appropriate classification system to automate and check "best fit"
  • Assess the opportunities for early testing of this fit (via multiple viewpoints)
  • Publish our studies and classification schemes for resolving life-cycle business issues and interoperability

Related More Detailed Planning Documentation

Performance Success Indicators

• Strategic Project/Milestone Performance Indicators
  • A working BSP Framework
  • Usable and sharable BSP Framework
  • The basis for writing RFPs and awarding Contracts
  • A means for commissioning agents (and other evaluators) to observe Quality of Service indicators
• Operational (~Toby's) Indicators
  • Sample buildings will be examined to trace such metrics over a building lifecycle and to help determine what building data is needed outside the building itself
  • Completed building systems will include a delivery mechanism for quality of service measures as indicated within the framework. Service provisioning will be unambiguous
  • Building service interactions required by regulatory bodies. When these regulations exist:
    • Services required by regulation can be framed and monitored within the BSP framework
    • Quality of Service (QOS) indicators in the framework can be used to determine regulatory compliance where mandated performance levels exist.
• Business services will be defined in terms of business value creating acommon lexicon for owners, operators, tenants, and other stakeholders
  • Business services and QOS provisions will be included in leases
  • QOS numbers and dollars per square foot will become a property differentiator (competitive advantage) that owners and tenants can easily understand
    • For example: new building/new lease terms include a contract to operate at a Healthy Building Index of 85 for $2.25 per sf over the next 36 months.

• Create templates for 10 facility types using BIMstorm models as samples. Map a basemap of less than 250 MasterFormat specification sections to UniFormat and OmniClass. Identify relevant building codes and industry standards for each model and facility type during design and construction. Extend the building elements to the Owners operations to assist Owners and local jurisdictions to access parts of the building information using the BSP framework. Base the prototype on the following facility types using models provided by Onuma Planning System. Classified below by OCCS Table 11, Construction Entities by Function:
  • 11 11 00 00 Assembly
  • 11 12 00 00 Learning
  • 11 13 11 31 Fire Station
  • 11 13 24 11 Hospital
  • 11 14 21 00 Museums
  • 11 16 00 00 Residential
  • 11 17 11 00 Offices
  • 11 21 11 00 Manufacturing
  • 11 52 00 00 Transportation Routes
  • 11 90 00 00 Mixed Use

• • Define the geospatial access requirements for local, state, and federal jurisdictions for building data in place.
  • Clarify the relationships of Function and Service
  • Incorporate building services, spaces and system zones into the framework by including OCCS Table 13, Spaces by Function, (based on ISO Table 4.5 Spaces by function or user activity) and OCCS Table 13, Spaces by Form (based on ISO Table 4.4 Spaces by degree of enclosure.)
  • Establish relationships between groups, elements, building codes, and building service performance metrics suitable for evaluation:
    • Use Groups(s)
    • Construction Type
    • Special Materials or Spaces
• Map between UniFormat, MasterFormat2004 and OmniClass to suit various tasks, users, and facility lifecycle phases.
  • UniFormat, OCCS, and MF2004 all talk about the same subjects in different ways to answer questions within living documents. Semantic maps between the classes will help communicate across knowledge boundaries to translate into and out of varying levels of detail and terminology precision.
    • UniFormat is useful for large organizations like GSA, collaborative efforts such as BIMstorm, Owners, estimators, and building codes. For example “Is this an outside wall?” “Is this Use Group R-2?”
    • MF2004 is suited to contract documents, the Commissioning process (Cx), products and manufacturers.
    • OCCS enables classification of the entire built environment through a system of interrelated tables that incorporate MF2004 and UniFormat. Symbolic deliminators may be used to combine functions, forms, work results, products, disciplines, tools, properties, phases and more. Each table has one or more corresponding ISO standards.

How the BSP Framework Could be Used

The use cases below are simply thought exercises illustrating how the BSP Framework could be used. They are not intended to indicate final products, but instead stimulate your thinking.

• During design, a six story building is designed as commercial space on the ground floor, a restaurant on the second, and office space for the next 4 floors. Quality indicators for all three types of space rely on the Effective Ventilation Index (EVI).
  • Commercial Comfort Index is defined based upon room temperature, humidity, occupancy, and EVI. The standard for a strip mall is 1.0. The lessee, a high end store, requests that a CCI of 1.2 be provided, and documented by the underlying systems. The BTU/square foot must be no worse than industry standard.
  • The restaurant is divided into seating area, judged under the CCI the catering area, in which a higher EVI is required by regulation. For the commercial space, the CCI must take into account the higher density of sitting customers compared to the retail space downstairs.
  • Office space is quite competitive and the local market has high vacancy rates. The owner wishes to promise Office Worker Alertness Index greater than 0.8 ( compared to current index of 0.65) to achieve reduced vacancy rate.

• Mapping problems include incompatible:
  • Metrics: Consistent, reliable measurements for new performance requirements that combine several factors over over time. For example Operational Indicators such as a “Healthy Office Building Index” where cost per square foot could be related to indoor air quality to determine and agree upon expected performance. Such indicators are already possible to describe using OCCS and reference standards, many existing software programs and devices can be used to track certain parts. A common framework will help to link together, track, and monitor simpler metrics that have varying levels of detail in th background.
  • Terminology: The language used to define sustainable design requirements and building codes is loose compared to specifications for a project. Current efforts by the Construction Specification Institute (CSI) and others will be available in the near future, until then, the construction industry still uses a lot of field slang, many common words having multiple meaning (for example "Flat" paint sheen or concrete tolerances?). Linking terminology with particularly MF2004 will help to disambiguate word meaning.
  • Exchange Requirements: Which gaps need to be filled for data to "live forever” after the Cx process concludes and buildings begin moving through their operational lifecycle? What do local jurisdictions or environmental boards want or need from project data? It is unlikely anyone but the Owner or manufacturers need or want to see every single building control report over years and years to draw conclusions about performance. What should Owners, manufacturers and others be obligated to provide and update regularly? Why clog up the works if local jurisdictions and environmental boards only consistently needed certain information from models, drawings, specs. Maybe only certain parts need to be brought up to speed and semantically mapped with precision - what are they?

• Other Use Cases might be listed:
  • City Fire System Life Cycle Planning
    • Neighborhood designs to optimize travel time and city design goals
    • Fire (and Disaster Incident) Command Centers relation to Station Location and Critical Infrastructure
    • Known and interoperable exit and entry points; locations of hazardous materials
  • Policy Tradeoffs between shortening the permit process as an incentive for energy-comfort design decisions
    • Building Service Performance indices predicted by interoperable models and data sources; and actual performance monitored and controlled by sub-system devices using oBIX standards

"Need more information below"

• Jaimie Clark, in an Ontolog presentation sparked our hope and a vision of how a usable framework could be created with the resources at hand and within a few years.
• Scope:
  • Open discussion and publication of advisory documents
  • NOT standards, but rather frameworks and approaches to using "gold" standards
  • Distinguish between a System and a Service

Related Topics outside of the BSP Charter

Governance and Operational Planning

• Does it belong? If so, where?

Time lines and Road Maps

• Major Project Milestones

Resources and Skills

• Resources
  • Related organizations and their Domain Maps
  • Annotated Bibliography of related documents

• Skills