To achieve the Holy Grail where our buildings receive a signal and respond appropriately is a very complex set of problems, indeed. Standards, protocols, and custom applications have historically produced some successes at the facility level. To truly reach the tipping point where DR has a significant impact, our buildings need to evolve to a higher intelligence. To reference some concepts from Building 2.0: it’s about evolving from integration to interoperability, and it’s about evolving from facilities-centric applications to applications that combine the resources of the entire enterprise.
For those in the building automation industry, integration is nothing new. For the last decade we have been able to get a device from one manufacturer to talk to a device from a different manufacturer through the use of gateways or software interfaces. In fact, standards like BACNet,® LonWorks®, and Modbus have gone a long way to bridging the data gap between HVAC systems and energy meters, for example. Integration at the building level and interoperability at the device level can be achieved, but at the high cost of custom system integration programming.