🎧 #023: Unpacking advanced supervisory control with Nexus Pro Members

“When you come in and try to take control… or transparency and ownership of the system away from somebody, that’s when you start running into problems. I think you have to not just replace a process, but data-enrich the process… It has to be able to engage with people onsite.”

—Tyson Soutter

Welcome to Nexus, a newsletter and podcast for smart people applying smart building technology—hosted by James Dice. If you’re new to Nexus, you might want to start here.

The Nexus podcast (Apple | Spotify | YouTube | Other apps) is our chance to explore and learn with the brightest in our industry—together. The project is directly funded by listeners like you who have joined the Nexus Pro membership community.

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Summary

• I started out the episode by introducing the topic, advanced supervisory controls, and summarizing why this is important for smart buildings, climate change, and much more.
• Then we heard from our panelists, three of whom are past podcast guests. We had: Keith Gipson of facil.ai, Tyson Soutter of Siemens, Terry Herr of Intellimation, and Jean-Simon Venne of BrainBox AI.
• The five of us unpack this topic, which I think is the most misunderstood topic and smart buildings right now.

Mentions and Links

1. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) (3:32)
2. facil.ai (4:41)
3. Phoenix Energy Technologies (4:55)
4. Tridium (5:59)
5. Intellimation (14:11)
6. Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL) (14:32)
7. VOLTTRON (15:40)
8. AIRCx (15:48)
9. KGS Buildings (15:51)
10. BrainBox AI (18:37)
11. Copper Tree (32:47)
12. ASHRAE Guideline 36 (34:03)

You can find our panelists on LinkedIn: Keith Gipson, Tyson Soutter, Terry Herr, and Jean-Simon Venne.

Enjoy!

Music credit: The Garden State by Audiobinger

THE ABOVE AUDIO, VIDEO, SUMMARY, AND LINKS WILL ALWAYS BE FREE. PODCAST DEEP DIVES WITH MY REACTIONS, MY TOP HIGHLIGHTS, AND THE FULL TRANSCRIPT ARE EXCLUSIVELY AVAILABLE TO MEMBERS OF NEXUS PRO.

Here’s this week’s deep dive outline:

• My reaction, including highlights:
• Defining ASC
• Origins of the concept from Keith
• Difficulties implementing closed loop optimization from Tyson
• Terry on national lab resources and potential for deployment of ASC as ‘the next big thing’
• Jean-Simon on what’s changed (data storage, computational capacity, neural networks), and why now is the time to start pushing ASC at scale
• Keith introduces facil.ai, and describes the social engineering aspect of the transition to ASC
• Confronting perceived controversies: robot vs. operator, the control should be done by the control system
• The potential for closed-loop optimization as a tool for an analytics or fault detection service offering
• The value proposition for building owners

• Full transcript

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