A Modern View of BMS - J2 Innovations

J2 Innovations started in 2008 in California. As an innovative start-up, it has subsequently been acquired by the Siemens Group. Siemens wanted to have a next-generation platform for smart buildings and IoT. J2 has developed the FIN framework, a very flexible, customizable software platform for addressing market requirements.

We interviewed Chris Irwin, who has worked in the industry for 35 years; he trained originally as an electronics engineer but pursued a management and business development career. He joined J2 Innovations post-acquisition to globalize the sales.

We discuss an up-to-date view of building management systems, looking at how they're getting adapted to suit modern needs.

If you'd prefer, you can listen to the interview in full on our podcast. 

What is your vision/mission for the industry?

I've always been very passionate about the simplicity of systems. Having worked in building automation, which is inherently complex, the software and technology used has been historically quite difficult for people to work with. There's a lot of training overhead and requirements for skilled engineers to make buildings work properly, and that's a big problem in the industry because there's never enough skills or enough people who really know what they're doing. Building in more smart technology to systems has always been a passion of mine to help simplify the process. I think that's very important for our market. I want to work with companies that are providing that disruptive influence on the industry.  

FIN was created from the beginning to try and make things easier both from the end user's perspective in terms of how they navigate through the web browser interface and also from the engineering workflow perspective, looking at how to simplify the configuration processes and automate tasks to reduce manual clicking. We're also taking it to another level with our micro BMS and eco concepts, where we turn it into a wizard-based configuration approach that requires hardly any pre-training. This is extremely useful for smaller buildings which are the vast majority; only a minority of buildings are big skyscrapers or hospital complexes.

As we transition to more complex, high-performance, energy-efficient buildings, it's apparent that traditional building management systems are not up to the task of monitoring and managing today's building operations, so in your opinion, what are the shortcomings of legacy BMS?

Building automation systems have evolved since the 1980s, but they have been designed from the beginning to be fundamentally about control. They've not been designed for monitoring. They've been preoccupied with the control of a building for comfort conditions, but as time's gone on, the building operators have become increasingly interested in the data coming from their buildings. Often building systems have been installed without sufficient sensors; therefore, they're not providing as much rich data as building operators would now like.

The industry has also been focused to deliver upfront requirements for people investing in buildings without thinking much about the life cycle implications of the system. The industry structure is geared towards tight budgets, and then the building operator has to then live with that. However, the world has changed, especially since the advent of IoT. There is now a much stronger requirement for data management and analytics. There is an increased focus on building costs over its life cycle.

As you mentioned, smaller commercial buildings make up the bulk of the stock out there, and many of these small commercial buildings don't have a building automation system. According to the Department of Energy's Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS), 94% of all commercial buildings are less than 50 000 sq. ft. Of these small commercial buildings, only 11% have a building automation system, so do you think more needs to be done to enforce efficient running and minimize energy wastage in these buildings?

Oh, absolutely, 100%. I've mentioned already I'm pretty passionate and excited about this topic. The only way we're going to get to net-zero, or even close, is if we address the bulk of the buildings that have, up to now, not had effective controls. Part of the problem is they are not properly managed in a maintenance sense (similar to our homes). If you think of the paradigm of one's car, when I was young, cars were fairly mechanical, they didn't have any computers in them, and you could maintain them yourself, but now very few people even attempt to maintain cars themselves, they just take it to the garage, and they plug it into their computer diagnostics to work out what's wrong with it. Well, with smaller buildings and in our homes, we still have this DIY paradigm of maintaining it ourselves, so this has been a huge barrier in the adoption of smart technology because it requires a level of skill and understanding that are currently lacking.

Building management systems have historically been too complex and need to be simplified; this is one of the many reasons smaller buildings tend to be less environmentally friendly; another is cost and payback.

You mentioned the need for upskilling, which is a challenge across the industry and is often quoted as being a barrier, but it could be argued that the technology is here and it has been around for quite a while, but in terms of building new buildings, the construction industry seems quite reticent to change and to modernizing its practices. So, what do you think needs to change to speed up the adoption and the upskilling in the construction industry? 

I think that it's pretty clear that it's not going to happen without legislation and government initiatives. The European Union have something called the EPBD, the Energy Performance Building Directive, which has been driving requirements for individual national governments to implement legislation and mandate the improvement in energy efficiency. The EPBD rating has changed the rental of buildings, as they have to be a certain minimum level of energy efficiency, and that level's going up. I think over time, that's going to force landlords to invest in energy improvements because they won't be able to let their buildings if they don't. We've got to up the game here; we've got to improve the standards. I think that will drive change. 

I don't think it's fair to blame the building industry per se. I think people investing in buildings should be thinking about the big picture; they're often doing it speculatively, they're not occupying the buildings, they're not therefore worried about the lifecycle costs. They're always going to be focused on driving down capital costs; that's a big problem, even though actually, the payback on a decent control system is faster than almost anything else.  

The legislation and standards that are starting to emerge are definitely pushing this innovation more, which is what we need; we need to break away from the tried and tested methods that have been implemented time and time again, and we need something to force this more innovative change. 

I think the climate change crisis is also increasing people's awareness; the problem is we're creating too many emissions, and our climate is about to fall apart. The climate crisis is causing huge disruption to people's lives through catastrophic, extreme events, not to mention rising sea levels and the impact on migration. We've got to get to grips with this collectively; it's really a very serious deal for us.

Traditionally building automation and management systems involve high purchase and installation costs, and they require services, parts and then possible replacement over time, so do you think there's potentially too much of a focus on the hardware side of things and not so much on the software? 

The industry started with electronics and embedded microprocessor technology, and it got to a point where you could create an electronics product with inputs and outputs to control different bits of equipment in a building, and then the networking technology got to a point where you could wire it all up together and make it work as a single system. We've continued in that paradigm for a long time. But in the last ten years, there's been a migration to IP technology. IP networking has become ubiquitous in buildings for computing purposes and including wi-fi and wired ethernet, etc., now all the building automation systems are based largely on IP. You even have wireless wi-fi sensors, or via gateways, you have wireless devices that come into the IP network.

Now that everything's on IP, you can have a different paradigm. Instead of having intelligence in all the individual controllers, you can actually have that intelligence separately somewhere else on the IP network. It doesn't have to be in every piece of hardware, which can reduce the cost of individual parts.

Of course, you can't have a system without the hardware; it's just about understanding what's appropriate. The other problem is one of scale; this is where the industry has been somewhat backward because everyone's been making proprietary hardware; they've been charging a huge premium for that and hiding the software costs within the hardware.

This software layer that we've talked about could be a way of future-proofing buildings. Building systems and energy and sustainability systems have evolved a lot over the last five years; a lot of things are commonplace within buildings now, such as rainwater harvesting, exterior shading, renewable energy, sun-tracking systems, etc., but five years ago, they weren't, so how do we ensure that the BMS we're installing today is future-proofed and can evolve as the industry continues to evolve?

I think the biggest single thing is that building management systems need to be less siloed in their architecture. A lot of them were developed in the windows era and have evolved and been iterated on, but architecturally they're getting quite old, and that's challenging in a new IoT world. Protocols used in buildings have been BACnet, Modbus and KNX, which are very much just known to the building services people; outside of that, people don't understand those protocols, so I think a move to more generic and widely understood protocols by the IT world is likely. That will make it more flexible to integrate with a variety of things, which is already happening in some bigger buildings. People want to integrate meeting room booking systems and hot desk management devices for monitoring, and air quality management has become a big issue in the last couple of years.  

There are a lot of standards that exist within the built environment and many have great intentions, and they want to drive positive change. So, are there any that stand out for you? I know you've mentioned the European Directive, but is it getting adopted, or are there any others that are getting utilized? Do we need more government backing to provide continuity across the industry and help drive adoption?

Yes, I think there are various initiatives that are very positive. One of them being the manufacturers of wireless devices getting together, e.g., thread, matter, nest, google and others, are collaborating to try and agree on a common wireless standard. This is great because at the moment we've got competing standards and that's causing fragmentation in the market, which is not good.

I also think that the DALI+ standard is a really big innovation from the lighting industry point of view. It addresses the issue of proprietary versus open, so for the first time, IP routers that manage DALI devices will have an open standard at the IP level, which opens the way for a reduction in the cost of lighting systems because instead of every manufacturer having their own proprietary gateways that only talk to their proprietary software you can now have more generically useful gateways. We have already seen this in the HVAC market with BACnet, where for many years you've been able to get BACnet routers that manage BACnet devices on the lower-level network and then bridge it up to IP. The same is true with Modbus 2, for that matter, so I think that innovation in the lighting industry could be quite transformative.

I also think intelligent government backing helps enormously to accelerate change, but equally, the government can sometimes back the wrong horse, so we have to be careful about that. The industry left on its own to decide probably isn't the best way, but equally, too much government intervention can distort the market, so I think there's a balance to be had.