Too many links in the chain

Intelligent buildings, home automation, smart cities, the Internet of Things. With the promise of more connectivity and a better life, these topics have been talking points for decades, but will new arrivals in the automation market change our approach for good?

At the beginning of the 21st century we were promised a future of convenience and connectedness, with appliances that would talk to one another and take the drudgery out of everyday life. Somewhere in all the talk of driverless vehicles, wearable devices and robot workers, the ‘futurist’ was born.

As the title suggests, futurists make fairly sweeping statements about what our projected lives might look like 5, 10 or 20 years from now. For every prediction that has been on the money, there are plenty that have proven to be spectacularly wrong. Nice work if you can get it. Accuracy is apparently not an intended by-product of futurism, the value is in the act of considering these predictions and seeing the potential for change.

The two faces of automation

Automation has always been depicted as a bit of a double-edged sword — it came with a promise of an easier life, yet equally threatened to kill off jobs. You don’t have to search too far to find lists of professions slated for extinction in the next decade or two courtesy of advances in technology. The reality is probably a little less dramatic, with many suggesting that increased automation will create role metamorphosis rather than the outright disappearance.

An article published by Greentech Media in late January proposes that further automating buildings will create jobs, rather than kill them off. It suggests that the provision of economically employable technologies — particularly software used to analyse equipment and systems — is effectively reducing the number of hours that need to be spent on troubleshooting, freeing up facility and network managers to actually carry out the work required. The change here, it says, is that automating operations will enable staff to concentrate on strategic issues which are at present unaddressed due to workload.

This may be the case, but the propensity for developers to treat each subsystem within a building as a separate standalone entity (and to create a specification and sales process that largely encourages this) means it is all much easier said than done.

Conquering communication

Interoperability has always been a problem area, as everyone comes at it from their own angle. Every discrete system — lighting control, access control, audiovisual systems, building management, HVAC — uses its own proprietary protocol and hardware, creating a need for integration devices, customised software and device firmware to facilitate communication and to create the illusion of a seamless network that is somehow greater than the sum of its parts.

There are also different wiring topologies from system to system, which not only makes it potentially difficult to achieve faultless operation, it also serves to muddy the waters when things don’t come to together as expected. Too many cooks, as the saying goes.

From an operational perspective, building managers will often have to run disconnected specialist software programs and view several different dashboards to get a full overview of a facility’s performance.

Opening up to open source

To alleviate the obvious problems this situation continues to present, new associations such as Project Haystack are springing up. Project Haystack is an open source initiative that aims to streamline working with the increased amount of data generated by the Internet of Things.

The association says that the sheer amount of operational data collected in today’s buildings is creating a new problem — how do we make sense of it? According to the Project Haystack website, “Most operational data has poor semantic modelling and requires a manual, labour-intensive process to ‘map’ the data before value creation can begin. Pragmatic use of naming conventions and taxonomies can make it more cost effective to analyse, visualise, and derive value from our operational data.”

It says that all members of the intelligent building value chain can reap the benefit from participation in the project:

• Building owners and consultants can specify that Haystack conventions are used in automation systems, which will provide cost-effective analytics and building management and a degree of future-proofing.
• System integrators and vendors or manufacturers can integrate support for Haystack into their products and position themselves for future value-added services.

Current members include some familiar names from the building management, services and controls sectors, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

The new kids on the block

High-end luxury homes are essentially smaller versions of commercial intelligent buildings, comprising many of the elements found in hotels and office towers, so the same integration issues can apply. Early home automation designs featured a centralised controller, but most vendors moved away from this methodology and into a distributed architecture over the years, ensuring that the system remains operational in the event of a single device failure.

At the other end of the spectrum lies the new wave of home automation products, where the emergence of players such as Google, Apple and Amazon in this market signals a significant change in direction.

For starters, the underlying motivation is different. Home automation was once the domain of indulgence and extravagance, while commercial applications were all about saving energy, reducing emissions and lowering costs. That same energy management focus started to apply in the residential landscape, but the devices being pushed by tech behemoths in recent times are probably more aligned with the vendor’s own self-interest. ‘Traditional’ home automation manufacturers just wanted to sell products, but these guys want users... and they want every part of them and their lives.

It’s no coincidence, for example, that the latest Google Pixel smartphone phone comes with a dedicated cable to transfer existing data from an iPhone — including contacts, music and messages — making it extremely simple to transition out of the iOS environment into Android and away from Apple altogether.

These new product offerings are still in relative infancy and receiving mixed reviews as they come to market, but the Amazon (Echo) and Google (Home) devices share a similar launching point. Both feature dedicated speaker devices that operate via voice commands that activate ‘personal assistants’ to do the user’s bidding. Of course, we’ve had Siri and Cortana lining up to help users for a while now, so the act of speaking to an inanimate object has already become familiar enough to anyone with a fondness for gadgets.

Again, each of these vendors is coming at it from their own point of view.

Apple

Apple wants to keep selling iPhones, iPads and AppleTVs, so it’s still uncertain whether it will deliver a voice-activated speaker equivalent to the Amazon and Google offerings, but rumours are swirling in the IT world that something is in the works.

They currently offer a solution that incorporates the Home app and HomeKit-enabled accessories. The accessory products are sold via the Apple online store and the existing Australian line-up includes light sources manufactured by Philips Lighting, wireless sensors from Elgato (including door and window sensors) and door locks from Schalge.

In keeping with the company’s attitude to app development and certification for iOS, Apple takes a closed shop approach to integration. To create HomeKit-enabled accessories, vendors need to be an MFi licensee to access the resources for manufacturing hardware that integrates HomeKit technology, including specific chip sets to work with the system, as well as stipulated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networking devices.

Once you’ve jumped through all the hardware hoops and developed the code, working samples need to be sent to Apple HQ for testing and verification, a process that can take up to five months, and you can’t publicise the fact that you are seeking certification until the entire process is finalised.

Once connected, HomeKit-enabled accessories are operated via an Apple device (iPhone, iPad or TV) using group commands, voice commands or time- and location-based triggers.

Amazon

Amazon is slightly more relaxed when it comes to integration. The Echo speaker and its miniature cousin the Echo Dot are ably supervised by Alexa, the company’s version of Siri. To achieve certification, vendors write code for their devices and submit it to Amazon for review. To take it to the next level and earn the right to display the coveted ‘Works with Alexa’ branding, the product must be submitted for testing by Amazon or a third-party facility — a process which is apparently significantly quicker than under the Apple scheme. Earning this tag has the added advantage of direct promotion on the Amazon website.

Google

Somewhere in the middle of the two extremes sits Google. Globally, it’s estimated that 250 products are certified to ‘work with Alexa’ and around 100 are certified as HomeKit-enabled. Google Home was only released in late 2016 and currently only offers integration with a handful of products including Nest thermostats (Nest is owned by Alphabet Inc, which owns Google), a range of Hue light sources from Philips Lighting and the odd Belkin switch or plug to enable control of other electrical devices. All three companies will probably continue to add products to their bank of supported devices.

So… what next?

Regardless of the differing levels of stringency in achieving integration certification, all three are leveraging off their huge existing customer bases and betting on that being attractive enough to get others on board. By putting the onus back on manufacturers to incorporate automation functionality into their products, they are free to concentrate investment into intelligent assistant software and to let everyone else develop appropriate hardware with built-in voice-activated capability in order to firm up the overall offering.

These systems are retrofittable; there is no requirement for additional cabling or any type of system design, no load controllers, dedicated push-button wall panels or touch screens and the user ‘commissions’ their own system via an app on their smartphone. It’s a substantially different approach. At this stage, it may not impact on the high end of the market, but is certainly making home automation more widely available and likely to draw users that would otherwise not have even considered smart home technology.

Mid last year, a report published in Smart Buildings Magazine announced that the global structured cabling market was in decline. It also suggested that the strongest area of growth “is expected to be in the cabling of wireless access points and other distributed building services such as CCTV, access points, access control, AV, whiteboards, digital signage, lighting and BACS/HVAC controls”. So, there’s life yet in the commercial sector, but we’ll just have to wait and see what the next five years brings to the residential market. Maybe we should ask a futurist.

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