Hey, all,

I am on a standards project committee at ASHRAE (American Society of Heating Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers) that is working on something related to the work being done at project Haystack.

I don't know if there is any room for potential synergies between Haystack and our standard (Standard 205), but wanted to at least wanted to make you all aware of the standard and I would love to follow up with any questions you might have.

ASHRAE Standard 205P:

TITLE: Standard Representation of Performance Simulation Data for HVAC&R and Other Facility Equipment

1. PURPOSE: To facilitate sharing of equipment characteristics for performance simulation by defining standard representations such as data models, data formats, and automation interfaces.
2. SCOPE: This standard applies to data used in the performance simulation of any HVAC&R or other facility system, equipment, or component.

Essentially, we are trying to make a standard way for manufacturers to provide performance data at various operating conditions for different types of HVAC&R equipment. This data would be used to perform energy simulation in tools like (but not limited to) eQuest and EnergyPlus.

So far we have begun development on specifications for Chillers, Unitary Equipment, and Fans.

If you are interested in finding out more please feel free to contact me at:

neal.kruis AT bigladdersoftware DOT com

Neil,

This is a very positive move and I both encourage your efforts in the ASHRAE project committee and wish you luck in finding a way for both organizations to work together.

Please feel free to contact me directly if you would like to discuss how we are planning on handling tagging in our S4 Open: BACnet-N2 Router. Essentially, we are providing the technology and user interface to enable tagging. We will then deliver the tags along with other point properties to requesting applications via any protocol that we publish to. However, we are deferring to our integration partners who are HVAC experts to actually assign the tags. Being a gateway product we need to remain BACnet client agnostic. We know that a huge number of people are supporting the Haystack effort. But, at the same time we know that there are other taxonomies being used for very valid reasons.

In addition to what you are doing I would like to see you encourage the BACnet committee to make provisions in all variations of the BACnet protocol to transport ANY assigned tags between devices and applications. An application might be a traditional BACnet OWS, or any of the newer generation of cloud based applications that are proliferating.

Regards, Steve

Just to clarify, I believe the primary difference between Haystack and ASHRAE Standard 205 is that Haystack (from what I understand) is focused on operational performance of equipment and 205 is focused on the predictive performance of equipment.

I can imagine that some groups may want to inform their predictive models using data from the operational performance, or even compare "out-of-the-box" performance to in-situ performance. These maybe fairly minor use cases, but there is at least some potential there.

Both groups also are tasked with defining "tags" (or "data elements" in the case of 205) which characterize the performance of a piece of equipment over a range of operating conditions. At the very least, it would be good to have some people involved with project Haystack to review the proposed data elements for our schema.

Finally, if you would like to be more involved with Standard 205, we have meetings every 6 months (at the ASHRAE annual and winter conferences) and you are more than welcome to join our mailing list and obtain access to our working group website with our draft documents. Please contact me if you'd like to be added.

Thanks!

Hi Neal, haystack is not focused on any specific application. The methodology of haystack is application neutral. Its a way to describe the meaning of data no matter what you application is. It is true that to date it has been used for analytics applications, but now we are seeing adoption in BAS graphics/visualization, energy analysis etc., and support by a growing number of companies for their products.

Performance analysis and predictive performance are applications that need to consume and interpret data. In either case I think the same techniques could apply. The predictive performance analysis applications may need additional tags beyond those defined by the community to date, but that is the beauty of the haystack approach -- you can add tags at will to explore and prototype. Those tags can be agreed upon by consensus on this forum, or just used ad hoc to accomplish your specific goals for data sharing Haystack is first a methodology to define semantic data and second a growing set of standard, community agreed semantic models for equipment systems.

I hope members of both efforts will interact to cross pollinate ideas and explore ways that the data semantics portion of the work effort can be shared.