The document discusses lessons learned from 10 years of experience with the Internet of Things. It describes an enterprise approach to managing energy usage and equipment performance across thousands of buildings using the Siemens Site Controls platform. Due to the large amount of data generated daily, a building-centric approach relying only on alerts and alarms is ineffective. Instead, prioritized exception reporting, rule-based analytics, data aggregation, and ranking sites by performance indicators helps users focus on the most important issues. The "Real World" is unpredictable, so the system is designed to expect failures and handle large amounts of complex data.

1. © Siemens Industry, Inc. 2015 All rights reserved. http://siemens.com/rcs
The Internet of Things - Ten Years of
Lessons Learned

2. © Siemens Industry, Inc. 2015 All rights reserved. Building Technologies Division
The Site Controls platform helps retail chains achieve
energy efficiency and smart consumption goals
Seven thousand installed sites with premium
clients:
✓ Retail (small, medium, & big box)
✓ Grocery
✓ Restaurants
✓ Health Clubs
✓ Branch Banks

3. © Siemens Industry, Inc. 2015 All rights reserved. Building Technologies Division
Enterprise vs. "Building-Centric" approach
Site Controls Enterprise Portal
On-demand exception management vs. alarm bombardment is one key
• Voluminous data isn't actionable;
Information when prioritized is
• Identify most expensive enterprise
problems first for best returns
• Verify corrective actions and service
work remotely for all buildings
• Integrate & prioritize all energy
consumption data into one platform
• "It's a Process not a Project”
Typical Customer: several hundred sites, several thousand HVAC units, several thousand
lighting circuits, ten thousand sensors, a thousand energy meters

4. © Siemens Industry, Inc. 2015 All rights reserved. Building Technologies Division
Big Data!
• A typical site generates about 40,000 timestamped data points per day.
• That’s 40 million data points per day for an enterprise of one thousand sites.
• In a year… it’s too many to think about
• Without good analytics, the data is overwhelming

5. © Siemens Industry, Inc. 2015 All rights reserved. Building Technologies Division
Alerts and Alarms are not the answer
If only 1 in 10,000 data points causes an alert or alarm…
…and an enterprise generates 40 million data points per day:
4,000 Alerts or Alarms per day
“Alarm Fatigue”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue

6. © Siemens Industry, Inc. 2015 All rights reserved. Building Technologies Division
All of these buildings are in the Real World™
It’s a messy, complicated, uncooperative, unrelenting place.
Bad Conditions:
things get smashed, painted over, disconnected and relocated
Bad Comms:
sometimes no comms at all, sometimes garbled comms
Bad Devices:
sensors fail, sensors become uncalibrated, devices age
Human “Help”:
humans are smart in an evil way

7. © Siemens Industry, Inc. 2015 All rights reserved. Building Technologies Division
All of these buildings are in the Real World™
It’s a messy, complicated, uncooperative, unrelenting place.
The natural
environment is
harsh…

8. © Siemens Industry, Inc. 2015 All rights reserved. Building Technologies Division
All of these buildings are in the Real World™
It’s a messy, complicated, uncooperative, unrelenting place.
…not just harsh,
but dangerous!

9. © Siemens Industry, Inc. 2015 All rights reserved. Building Technologies Division
All of these buildings are in the Real World™
It’s a messy, complicated, uncooperative, unrelenting place.
Things wear out in the
Real World™, often
when no one is
looking.
Fan Belt

10. © Siemens Industry, Inc. 2015 All rights reserved. Building Technologies Division
All of these buildings are in the Real World™
It’s a messy, complicated, uncooperative, unrelenting place.
Humans are
the worst!

11. © Siemens Industry, Inc. 2015 All rights reserved. Building Technologies Division
All of these buildings are in the Real World™
It’s a messy, complicated, uncooperative, unrelenting place.
Lamp placed so as
to heat thermostat
Humans are
the worst!

12. © Siemens Industry, Inc. 2015 All rights reserved. Building Technologies Division
Plan for failure at every level
Controller/
Gateway
Sensors/
Devices
Wireless
Wired (Modbus)
Internet
Store
Private
Corporate
Network
VPN
Siemens
Site
Controls
X
X
X
X X
X
X
X
X - Point of failure

13. © Siemens Industry, Inc. 2015 All rights reserved. Building Technologies Division
Lucky us! The Real World™ runs on physics!
• Real-world physics limits the possible correlations
in data
Example: a rooftop HVAC unit’s performance will
not have any effect on the performance of a boiler
in the basement
• This means that rules are more effective than
statistics for analytics
Example: Outside Light Sensor should see
regular periods of brightness and darkness. If
not, sensor is likely broken, damaged, painted
over or otherwise out of order.
Image by By Brews O’Hare (Own work)
via Wikimedia
In Real World™ analytics, rules are usually handier than statistics

14. © Siemens Industry, Inc. 2015 All rights reserved. Building Technologies Division
Use data aggregation and ranking in your analytics toolkit
• Aggregation:
kWh / square foot / day
Min kW, Max kW
Average outside air temperature
KPIs, eg, site connectivity
• Rules detect exceptions exceptions have scores
• Rank sites by aggregating exception scores in various categories:
HVAC Health
Energy Use
Site Connectivity
On-site Comms
Etc…

15. © Siemens Industry, Inc. 2015 All rights reserved. Building Technologies Division
Aggregate exception scores to rank sites

16. © Siemens Industry, Inc. 2015 All rights reserved. Building Technologies Division
All of these techniques used together lead us
straight to the problems
HVAC not just broken, but blowing hot air

17. © Siemens Industry, Inc. 2015 All rights reserved. Building Technologies Division
Nature is tough
Human beings are worse more devious
Alerts and Alarms won’t cut it with Big Data
Plan for failure at every point
Rules are better than statistics in the Real World™
Aggregation reduces the amount of data you need to digest
Ranking makes the best or worst easy to find
Lessons7
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18. © Siemens Industry, Inc. 2015 All rights reserved. Building Technologies Division
http://siemens.com/rcs
robert.hafernik@siemens.com
@robhafernik