Between the Poles

Open modeling standard released for public comment by OGC and OpenMI

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the OpenMI Association (OpenMI) have released the proposed Open Modelling Interface Version 2 (OpenMI) standard for public comment.  This standard defines a standard apporach for independently developed computer models of environmental processes to exchange data as they run.
 
The original driver for the standard was the European Water Framework Directive and its requirement for an integrated approach to water management. The European Commission co-funded the research and development of a generic model interface, which is the OpenMI.
 
The immediate goal is to enable the  integrated modelling needed to understand Earth system processes.
 
Environmental modelling is not the only application of integrated modelling. For example, a possible shorter term application will simply be in enabling developers to convert their existing large, and often unmanageable, applications into sets of linkable components. This could change the modelling market from one for complete systems into one for components and services.
 
The documents being released for comment can be viewed and downloaded.  Comments are due by June 1 2013.

SPAR 2013: Digital highways require integrated engineering and geospatial data

At SPAR 2013 I had the opportunity to hear very forward looking presentations by Ron Singh, Chief of Surveys/Geometronics Manager at the Oregon Department of Transportation.  What Ron sees in the future and what motivates a lot of what Don sees needs to change in the highway construction process is autonomous vehicles, which will provide a major motivation for what Ron refers to as digital highways.

Automation over the last 25 years

If you look at the last 25 years there has been quite a lot of automation in the form of survey automation such as electronic data collection, GPS, and basic 3D laser scanning;  design automation such as computer aided design and drafting, and a bit of construction automation.  The primary focus has been on speeding up the project development process, but the end goal remains  2D paper construction documents.  Some people have been using what is called 2..5 D, a 3D roadbed prism with 2D objects on it.  In Ron's view the current way of designing and building highways has reached the end of it's lifetime and a complete transformation to a new paradigm is required.  The way Ron refers to this is standing the current process on its head and I blogged about it yesterday.  Fundamentally it involves intelligent 3D models replacing the current as-builts and a process that speeds up project development because it leverages existing engineering data rather that requiring a complete resurvey at the beginning of every project..

A new paradigm for intelligent highways

The objective is intelligent highways that will support autonomous and partially autonomous vehicles.  The new paradigm needs to be data-centric and real-time.  It will involve automated construction.   From a data management perspective it will require highway infrastructure lifecycle management, which will involve a very different approach to the survey/design/construct/maintain process that is currently used for highway projects in North America.

First of all, it will involve geospatially enabled 3D digital data. A key requirement is a low distortion geospatial coordinate system that will provide the foundation for geolocatiig all infrastructure including utilities.  It will require interoperability using industry standards for data exchange. Most importantly it will support a construction process that uses post-construction surveys to replace as-built plans with a full 3D engineered model that supports GIS/engineering data integration. 

It will require geospatially-enabled enterprise data management including version control and the ability to search for things geospatially.  It will provide tools for geospatially enabled asset management.  It will provide a framework for developing and maintaining engineering and geospatial data including 3D engineered models as well as scanned data for existiing structures for the entire life cycle of a highway.

Smart grid interoperability standards transitioning from government to the private sector

At the  IEEE PES Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Conference (ISGT2013) in Washington, I had the opportunity to attend a tutorial on the status of smart grid interoperability standards presented by several people (Mladen Kezunovic, Texas A&M University, Steve Widergren, Pacific Northwest National Lab, and Marty Burns, NIST, and David Wollman, Hypertek for NIST) who are associated with the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel, or SGIP 2.0 Inc, as it is now known in its new incarnation as a private, non-profit.

Background

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) directed National Institute of Standtards and Technology (NIST) to coordinate a framework for the smart grid in the United States.  Based on this mandate three years ago NIST created SGIP with a number of responsibilities, the primary one being to faciliate the development of standards for the the smart grid.  It is important to understand that SGIP was not mandated to create standards but to create an open, big tent where stakeholders could come together and participate in an inclusive, consensus buidling process that balanced the persepctives of all the stakeholders including regulators, investor-owned, cooperative, and municipal utilities, vendors of electric power products and services, consumers, and government.  In its first incarnation SGIP membership included 800 organizations, 1900 individual participants, and 22 stakeholder categories.  In addition, SGIP collaborated with 22 different standards organizations.

In the past three years SGIP has been busy.  The Catalog of Standards, a list of standards identified by SGIP as relevant to the smart grid, now includes 56 different standards.  10 of the 17 or so Priority Action Plans (PAPs) that SGIP initially targeted have been completed and closed.  Other acomplishments include a reference model for the smart grid, a cybersecurity framework (NISTIR 7628),  and the Interoperability Process Refernence Manual.  SGIP has played an important role in facilitating  the adoption of the Green Button (energy usage), OpenADR (energy schedule, common price, and demand response signals), and SEP 2 (electric vehicle information) standards.

But after three years it was felt that it is time for the private sector to take over the leadership role.   Hence SGIP has become SGIP 2.0 Inc.  SGIP 2.0 is a brand new international, private, non-profit.  It's new Executive Director since about a week ago is Patrick Gannon and its new legal name is SGIP 2.0 Inc. To date SGIP 2.0 has signed up over a hundred members.  At the IEEE PES tutorial Patrick Gannon said that new members are joining every day.

SGIP 2.0 is quite a different animal from the first generation SGIP.  It is intended to be funded primarily by its members.  There are now membership dues, where it used to be free.  Its organization structure involves a large board of directors representing 22 different  stakeholder groups.  It has an Executive Director, several standing committees, PAP teams, working groups, international liaisons with Korea, Japan, the EU, Columbia and Ecuador, and government agencies NIST, FERC, and DoE.  The Working Groups include a broad range of interests including buildings, electric vehicles, gas infrastructure, renewable energy, energy storage, and consumers.

SGIP's unique role

SGIP has a unique role to play because it takes a high level perspective on interoperability looking not only at the technical level, the domain of most electrical standards, but also at the aplication level, and most importantly the business process level.

Case study: synchrophasors

Synchrophasors provide an interestng example.  At the present time it is not possible to build a complete synchrophasor solution with products from a single vendor.  Many standards have been developed  to alow diferent deivices to talk to each other, to enable, for example, synchrophasors to talk to aggregators.  But as was discovered during the blackout of 2003, and subseqently during the recemt San Diego blackout, taken all together they do not provide a foundation for solving a basic business problem, fault analysis.  It took many months to piece together the data that allowed investigators to determine exaclty what happened in 2003 and in San Diego.  Mladen Kezunovic's team developed an application built on existing devices to do this, but it required a lot of expensive customization and does not represent a cost effective industry solution. 

An interesting aspect of fault analysis is identifying the grographic location of the fault which required integration with a GIS.

Green Button program

Another example is the Green Button  program.  I was at the Gridweek conference in September 2011 when Aneesh Chopra, then Federal CTO, challenged the electric utility industry to follow the example of the Veterans Affairs Blue Button program and  implement a Green Button program to provide one click consumer access to their own electric power usage data. When it was finally rolled out, Green Button was an overnight success, but the standardization work than enabled it to be rolled out across the nation was years in the making and SGIP was directly involved in facililitating the development of the Green Button standard.

In response to this chalenge SGIP looked at two high level use cases.  Frst, the case where the consumer downloads their own usage data.  The second is even more important from an innovation perspective and addresses how the consumer can authorize third party access to their usage data on an ongoing basis for analysis.  Based on this type of access,  the third party can analyze their uage data and provide tools to help them to reduce their power usage.  By looking at these use cases the SGIP team was able to identify gaps in the existing standards being developed by several groups including OpenADE, NAESB, and others.  SGIP brought these groups together and joinfly arrived at the Green Button standard that is managed by NAESB.  The Green Button standard was subsequenty rolled out and consumers now not only have access to their usage data for download, but can also authorize third party access to their usage data. 

Green Button is dramatically changing the consumer's relationship with the power utility.  Perhaps even more importantly from an economic point of view it is encouraging innovation in technology and applications to help consumers use power better.  DoE estimates that currently 16 million consumers have access to  their electric power usage data via a Green Button service provided by their power utility.  DoE expects that a further 30+ million will be getting Green Button access soon.  One of the very successful programs that DoE ran recently was the Apps for Energy competition.  DoE offered $100,000 to software developers for the best new apps that help utility customers make the most of their Green Button electricity usage data.  You can see the 56 winners listed here.

NRECA TechAdvantage: MultiSpeak, where it is and where it is going

At the NRECA TechAdvantage conference in New Orleans Gary McNaughton, MultiSpeak Techical Coordinator gave a comprehensive overview of where the MultiSpeak interoperability standard is and where it is headed.  If you're not familair with MultiSpeak, it has been developed under the auspices of NRECA and is intended as an industry-wide standard for the exchange of information for electricity distribution utilities and all vertically-integrated segments except power marketing and generation.  It is used by more than 600 electric coops, investor-owned, and municipal utilties in 15 countries and is widely recognized and supported by North American software vendors.

Cybersecurity

In light of President Obama's recent Executice Order on cybersecurity for critical infrastructure, security has become even more critical and Gary's message is that utiltiies need to get very serious about it.  To support this a new security standard for MultiSpeak was released in January 2013.  It goes beyond secure sockets (SSL) and transport layer security (TLS) and implements message-level security.  The standard requires that vendors support four security options, which they have agreed to do.

1. None (for debugging)
2. SSL or TLS
3. Message-level - by message
4. Message-level - by session

It is up to the utility to decide which of these it needs to implement.  There is a Cooperative Research Network (CRN) security policy template that is designed to help utilities to choose the appropriate option.

Use cases

The MultiSpeak team has developed over 300 use cases for specific business processes such as connecting a customer.  They cover business processes for demand response, meter data management, meter prepayment, outage management, and asset management.  So far they do not include GIS-related use cases (MultiSpeak has supported geospatial data types for years.)

Harmonization with CIM

MultiSpeak and the Common Information Model (CIM) have been converging in many ways over the years.  But according to Gary, at this point there is no plan to harmonize the two models in Version 5.  And it is not clear if they will ever be harmonized.

MultiSpeak 3

The big news is that there will be no further bug fixes and enhancements for Version 3, which is the most widely used version of MultiSpeak.  Gary said there was no reason for utilities to stop using Version 3, which is 10 years old now, unless the additional functionality in later versions is required.

MultiSpeak 4

Versions 4.1.5 and 4.1.6 have been released, with enhancements specifically to support the MultiSpeak Regional Demonstration project. It is expected that vendors will begin implementing support for this Version 4.1 in the next few months.  The big advantages of 4.1 are a more consistent data model and support for AMI, DR, MDM, AVL, and work management.  A nice thing about. MultiSpeak's web services implementation is that it means that a utility can run several versions of MultiSpeak concurrently.

MultiSpeak 5

Work has begun on a new version which will include work management enhancements and, most importantly, modernized web services support.  A prerelease will be available in May 2013.

Enterprise Service Bus

Gary made a persuasive case for using Multispeak in all but the simplest implementations with an enterprise service bus because it eliminates some of the problems associated with point to point messaging over TCP/IP.  For example, TCP/IP does not guarantee that a message is received or that several messages will be received in the expected chronological order.

Distributech 2013: After ARRA funding winds down Department of Energy shifts its focus

Patricia Hoffman, Assistant Secretary in the Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, Department of Energy (DoE), gave an overview of where the DoE will be focussing its efforts as ARRA funding winds down.

Quantifying benefit of smart grid

 In the past DOE provided incentives such as grants to encourage investment in synchrophasors, smart meter deployment, automated switches, and other smart-grid related technology and in training and education related to smart-grid.  DoE's focus is now shifting to aggregating usage data to quantify some of the benefits of the smart grid investment such as peak reduction, improved realiability, and operational efficiency.

Green Button

DoE has supported the Green Button program and estimates that currently 16 million consumers have access their electric power usage data via a Green Button service provided by their power utility.  She expects a further 30+ million will be getting Green Button access soon.  One of the very successful programs that DoE ran recently was the Apps for Energy competition.  DoE offered $100,000 to software developers for the best new apps that help utility customers make the most of their Green Button electricity usage data.  You can see the 56 winners listed here.

Analytics

DoE is encouraging utilities to make more use of the data that smart meter provide because it can be used to dramatically improve distribution reliability.  She mentioned that utilties are finding that smart meters enable them to detect outages before the first customer calls.  Also smart meters can provide valuable data during disasters.  She mentioned Alabama Power's use smart meters with Google Map to map power outages resulting from tornadoes.

Self-healing networks

She also mentioned intelliruptors, intelligent devices that makes power network self-healing.  With these devices and without human intervention networks automatically reconfigure themselves to isolate a fault and to mimimize the number of customers who are affected.

Cybersecurity

Cyber security is a priority item for DoE.  It is looking to information sharing and enabling tools for  situational awareness to detect intrusions.

Standards

Standards are important for creating an open, competitive market for smart-grid related devices.  Ms. Hoffman mentioned the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) specifically.

Future

Some of the future focus areas for DoE includes asset optimiization and the application of synchrophasors for predictive analysis.  In the future utilties will be performance driven which  will require the collection of a avriety of data for grid performamce metrics.

Moving from 2D design to 3D design standards in electricity distribution

The Utilities Standards Forum (USF) is an organization representing about 50 Ontario electricity distribution companies.  Its goal is collaboratively to define standards for its members to reduce duplication of effort.  

The USF has developed design standards for electricity distribution that meet the requirements of Ontario Regulation 22/04 under the Electricity Act of 1998.  Currently these are in the form of paper or PDF documents containing 2D isometric views of the components used in electricity distribution such as insulators, clamps, surge arrestors, fuse-cutouts, terminations, cross arms, cable guards, and other types of equipment.

There is pressure to move to 3D design standards.  There are several motivations for this.  In this time of the challenge of an aging workforce in the utility industry, increasing the efficiency of engineers and designers is an important motivator.  But another equally important one is the increasing number of younger designers and engineers that have been brought up in  3D digital world and want to work in a modern 3D environment.

At the EDIST 2013 Conference in Toronto an overview of the new 3D design standards was presented by Ron Lapier and Lori Gallauger of the USF.  The new 3D standard is a major step forward in two ways.  First of all the components required for electricity distribution design are now 3D so that electricity distribution design can be performed in a 3D environment.  But equally important USF intends to make them available digitally in the form of a library of DWG files containing 3D objects that can be brought into a 3D CAD environment and integrated with other components to create a completely 3D representation of an  electricity distribution design.  The design can be viewed and manipulated in 3D.  As well 2D drawings for construction can be generated from the 3d model.  The components have real world coordinates so that clearances and dimensions can be directly measured from the 3D model.

Open source reference implementation of the OGC Catalog Service released

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has made a determined effort to work with the open source community.Osgeologo   For example, the OGC and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) a few years ago.  One of the concrete results of the collaboration  between the OGC and the open source geospatial community is that OGC official reference implementations are open source.

A new reference implementation of an OGC standard hs just been announced.  pycsw is an official reference Implementation of the OGC Catalogue Service for the Web (CSW).  CSW provides a standard for publishing and the discovery of geospatial metadata.  As its name suggests, pycsw is written in Python.  It is certified OGC Compliant.

pycsw is an open source project under an MIT license and supports Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Quantifying the economic benefits of standards

U.S. NIST study

In 2004 in a remarkable study the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) attempted to identify and estimate the efficiency losses in the U.S. capital facilities industry resulting from inadequate interoperability.  The NIST study focussed on interoperability problems attributed to the highly fragmented nature of the industry, the industry’s continued paperbased business practices, a lack of standardization, and inconsistent technology adoption among stakeholders. 

It concluded that inadequate interoperability cost the U.S. capital facilities industry $15.8 billion in annually in 2002, but qualified the conclusion by saying that this is likely a conservative figure because there were additional significant inefficiency and lost opportunity costs associated with interoperability problems that were beyond the scope of NIST analysis.

Standards in Australia

In 2006 Centre for International Economics in Australia conducted a study for Standards Australia that attempted to quantify the economic impact of standardization on the Australian economy. 

In Australia in 2007 there were about 6 800 standards that are the responsibility of Standards Australia.  They include electrical and water industry technical standards, IT standards, management standards, and health and safety standards.  The economic benefits of standards that were considered include increasing trade, providing a basis for innovation and knowledge dissemination, reducing costs of production, increasing productivity, and assisting with risk management.

Economic benefit of standards on the national economy

Taking a statistical, macroeconomic approach the study quantified the correlation between the stock of standards and national productivity and found that a 1 % increase in the stock of standards is associated with a 0.17 % increase in productivity. 

The study also looked at the impact of standards on particular industries.  To do this the authors had to imagine what might have been done if there were no standards in the particular industry.

Economic benefits of standards in the mining industry

In the Australian mining industry it found that sampling standards increase accuracy and precision of mineral content of ores and concentrates and concluded that sampling standards increase the value of trade by  $24 million to $100 million per year.

Economic benefits of standards in water and electric power industry

In the water and electrical industries standards increase the effectiveness of the water and electricity  grids in using inputs and in delivering water and electricity to consumers. The economic benefit was estimated to be $1.9 billion per year.

New directions for geospatial standards: augmented reality, citizen observatories, and the Internet of Things

I have frequently blogged about some of the important geospatial standards that have been fostered by the Open Geospatial Consortium, most recently about a new Energy and Utilities Domain Working Group (DWG) for the electric, gas, oil and water services industries, the recently adopted GeoSMS standard  which is an extended Short Message Service (SMS) encoding and interface for exchanging location content between devices or applications, and the new Geosynchronization Services (GSS) standard for synchronizing distributed geospatial data stores.

Last week at the GIS in the Rockies annual conference in Denver Carl Reed of the Open Geospatial Consortium gave an overview of some of the directions geospatial standards are evolving.  It was really quite amazing to hear about such a range of application areas where OGC standards are making it possible for the exchange of information between different devices from different vendors.

GeoSMS and GSS

Carl gave several examples of how the GeoSMS simple messaging protocol and GeoSynchronization Services (GSS) are being applied in the real world.  An important example is a mobile use case involving an earthquake in a densely populated area.  A combination of GeoSynchroization Services (GSS), GML, and WFS standards allows first responders in the field to get situation assessments including maps on a variety of hand held devices.

Distributed geospatial updates

Another very relevant use case that is being tested as part of an OGC testbed involves using GeoSynchronization Services (GSS) to enable a large enterprise to receive real-time geospatial updates published by many users and sources, review them, and then insert those updates into web feature services (WFS) operated by many organizations in many different locations.

Integrating indoor and outdoor navigation

Imagine not only getting directions from your house to a shopping mall, but getting directions from your house to the specific counter in the hardware store where plumbing fixures are displayed.  This type of  integrated indoor/outdoor navigation applications are being developed using OGC CityGML and WMS standards. 

Augmented reality standard

Augmented reality involved superimposing imagined structures on the real world.  It is being widely used by architects and designers to visualize what a new building or other structure will look like in situ. At the OGC there is a Augmented Reality Markup Language (ARML) that is under development as a profile of the widely used OGC KML standard developed by Google.

Linking citizen observatories

Recently there has developed an wareness that "it is no longer sufficient to develop passive lists or reports to ‘inform’ citizens of changes in our environment. We need to engage with citizens and ask how they can ‘inform’ us."  (Prof. Jacqueline McGlade, Executive Director, European Environment Agency).  As a result the concept of a citizen observatory has evolved which allows citizens to monitor and report on environmental issues such as biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, and the impact of climate change. 

The Citizen Observatory Web (CobWEB) is intended to link these citizen observatories, providing a standards-based way of linking to sensors and mobile devices and enabling crowd-sourced, geospatially-based information about our environment. 

It will rely on the OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standard, that provides interoperability interfaces and metadata encodings for real time integration of heterogeneous sensor webs involving devices such as flood gauges, air pollution monitors, stress gauges on bridges, mobile heart monitors, Webcams, and robots as well as space and airborne earth imaging devices into the information infrastructure.

Internet of things

It is projected that the Internet of things, the interconnection over the internet of everyday intelligent objects, will include15 billion devices ranging from pollution monitors to refrigerators by 2015.  It will involve indoor/outdoor location, sensor webs, building information models (BIM), intelligent devices comprising the smart grid, devices for environmental monitoring, and household appliances. 

It will require standards such as the Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standard to allow all these devices, from many different vendors, to intercommunicate.  Carl gave two examples, one involving tracing fresh meat, absolutely critical in tracing meat as a source of infection, and another application used to monitor debris flow in Taiwan.

Importance of location standards

The most important things that I came away from Carl's talk with are first the wide range of domains where geospatial standards are being applied and, secondly, the realization that standards are becoming even more important than before, because we are on the brink of interconnecting billions of devices from hundreds of thousands of different vendors in many different countries over the internet.  Without standards it will be impossible to turn this data into actionable information. 

The other aspect of this new world of interconnected devices is that location is also becoming more important because, thanks to inexpensive GPS chips and the development of new GNSS systems by Europe and China and others, sensors these days can report their location.

New XML-based standard for exchanging information about water sources

The WaterML 2.0 Part 1: Time Series Encoding Standard has been adopted by the Open Geospatial Consortium as an OGC standard.  OGC WaterML 2.0 is XML-based and supports encoding and exchanging hydrological data describing the state and location of water resources, both surface water and ground water. 

WaterML 2.0 is designed to provide a standard for national reporting of water resources as well as for operational echange of data on the state of infrastructure such as water supply systems.  Much of the work was done as part of a joint program between the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM). 

The standard is important in Australia because it will be used in the development of the second version of the Water Data Transfer Format (WDTF) which mandates the techniques to be used by the Australian water industry to deliver water data measurements to the Bureau of Meteorology as required under the Water Regulations of 2008. 

The Australian effort was supported by the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science Hydrologic Information System (CUAHSI), which developed WaterML 1.0, and other organizations in the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, France, and the U.S including NOAA and USGS.