There is often a significant difference between public statements embracing standards and private actions opposing them. On first blush most companies express support for developing and complying with standards. However, when actually planning a strategy for creating a new product line, managers often ignore standards or view them as threats. This article explores this love/hate relationship with standards, explains the source of conflicts, and focuses on the importance of standards for successful IoT (Internet of Things) home and building automation industries.

There is an enduring myth that “my home is my castle.” I can close the door against unwanted intruders. The founders of the United States enshrined this in the fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution limiting government power to search a person’s home. This paper examines the reality, benefits, challenges, and possible technical solutions for excessive collection of private customer data. Technology is emerging in the form of communication gateways and premises equipment specifically programmed to guard and limit access to private data.

        

        

Gateway Enhancements for IoT Privacy  (view)

An international standard is under development by ISO/IEC to add cybersecurity and privacy protection features to the communications gateway linking a home network with an external service provider. Such a gateway functions as a building sentry. These sentry features enable the gateway to ensure that a customer’s expectation for privacy is implemented according to agreements with service providers. Since this screening function by the sentry is programmable, it would become practical for service providers to offer customers various privacy options. Customers might be provided extra services in exchange for disclosing additional personal data as part of a menu of privacy options. Gateway sentry technologies can enforce privacy choices thereby creating market opportunities for gateway manufacturers and service providers.

In January 2013, the “Modular Communications Interface for Energy Management” was approved as an American National Standard. This standard specifies a modular communications interface (MCI) for energy management signals and messages to be exchanged among customer devices. These devices might include consumer products such as sensors, thermostats, and appliances; and energy-related equipment such as an energy management hub, an energy management controller, an energy management agent, a residential gateway, and an energy services interface.

This article is based on an interview by Utilimetrics News. Dr. Wacks was asked to comment on the progress toward developing home area networks that will enable consumers to participate in electricity demand-management programs. He has seen interest in such programs come and go since the 1980s. This time, the interest might be more permanent.

        

This article explores the home network. A home network forms the basis for an emerging industry called home systems. The business potential for a home systems industry started to attract major manufacturers and organizations about 20 years ago. The impetus for significant growth has been the recent proliferation of broadband access to the Internet. Once consumers pay for high-speed service via cable or DSL (high-speed data via telephone lines), they want access from more than one location in the house. The solution is a home network implemented with an organized set of cables call "structured cabling."

        

Integrating a Home System  (view)

It has been about 20 years since manufacturers in the consumer electronics industry started to explore the business potential in home automation. Until then hobbyists had been jury-rigging controls for various home applications, such as lighting and entertainment. About a billion dollars has been invested in developing networking technologies and components for home systems, yet we are constantly on the verge of significant market growth, but not quite there. Why?

Lights, Camera, Action!  (view)

The 2020 pandemic has necessitated that business, conferences, and trade shows be conducted remotely. Therefore, we now need to augment our high tech expertise with skills in video production. Conference calls have migrated to teleconferences with video that allows sharing of documents so we can view slides or jointly edit a document. We all learned effective audio communications using a telephone, but very few of us have produced TV programs or movies. This paper examines some of the basics for effective video communications.

A fundamental tenet of communications is that perfect signal transmission is nearly impossible. Electrical noise in wires or radio signals is fundamental to the physics of materials because of the random vibrations of molecules. The universe is filled with radio signals from stars (especially the sun). Communication signals compete with this background noise to be detected. Much research in communications has focused on the signal-to-noise problem: how to overcome electrical or radio noise so a communications signal can be received over a long distance. This paper explores methods that come close to achieving perfect communications.

        

The analog-to-digital transition has had a profound impact on broadcast television picture quality in terms of resolution and shape. The results can be stunning compared to a mediocre analog show, or can be annoying with artifacts and a distorted image. The optimal viewing experience with a high-definition television (HDTV) depends on the source material, the broadcaster, the broadcast channel, the TV connection, and the television setup. The result is that HD is not always as good as it could be or as good as the program director created in the studio.

Impressive Audio Quality in Les Miserables  (view)

Most movie sets have poor acoustics. Singers usually record their movie vocals with accompanying music before filming. During filming, the recording is played back while the performer acts and sings. The actor must lip-sync precisely for a believable performance. In Les Miserables the director wanted to capture more of the actors' emotions during both dialog and vocals. Therefore, he had the actors sing on set and recorded their vocals for the soundtrack. The sound quality of the singers and the orchestra were captured with exceptional fidelity.

        

Television delivered via the Internet has begun, and the changes will be profound. For many years we have been able to listen to radio broadcasts from around the world via the Internet. Why not watch TV programs via the Internet? The term OTT (Over-The-Top) video refers to video delivered outside the package of channel lineups offered by the cable or fiber operator. This has serious implications for the business model of these operators. This article explains the new choices being offered to consumers for accessing video.

This article introduces a series of international standards for consumer energy management published by the ISO/IEC committee that Dr. Wacks chairs. ISO and IEC standards are developed by industry experts to promote world trade. These standards give users automated AI-based control over sources of power ranging from local solar, wind, and storage to transactive energy, microgrids, and public utilities. The objective is to ensure that the essential role of electricity continues, but from a diversity of sources that are more reliable, resilient to climate change, less polluting, and affordable.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a selling feature for consumer products. AI is being portrayed as endowing devices with lots of smarts that provide the user with a personalized experience. Now that AI is starting to be incorporated into controller software, an international standards committee was formed called Ethics in Autonomous and Artificial Intelligence Applications to develop guidelines for standards development on ethical aspects related to autonomous and/or AI applications. This article introduces AI and probes the recent concerns about ethical issues in developing AI algorithms.

This article focuses on the state-of-the art for customer-controlled energy management based on an international standard designated ISO/IEC 15067-3. This standard specifies automation equipment called the Energy Management Agent (EMA) at the customer’s home or building programmed with features based on artificial intelligence (AI). The AI engine determines power available from local sources (such as solar or wind), storage, or the public grid, the power needed to operate appliances the customer chooses to use, and optimizes power allocation based on the customer’s preferences and budget. The goal is to shift energy management from helping the public utility manage supply to helping the customer maximize the benefit of electricity at an affordable cost.

Thomas Edison developed the light bulb and built generators so his Wall-Street investors could work after subset to raise money for his company. Appliances were invented to create a demand for electricity during the daytime when lights were not needed. Throughout most of the twentieth century public policy, regulations, and tax laws encouraged utilities to expand the supply of power. It was not until the late 1980s that policy makers started to worry about whether the supply of electricity could be increased to meet the anticipated demand primarily from industrial growth. This paper reviews programs developed to manage customer demand for power. The introduction of local power generation from wind and solar is adding impetus to energy management because these supplies can fluctuate quickly with changing weather.

        

Regulators and appliance makers are seeking a simple method to deliver energy management data from a power utility or energy service provider to consumer products. These data may include electricity prices or event notices about energy shortages. The Home-to-Grid Domain Expert Working Group (H2G DEWG) at the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP), led by Dr. Wacks, has proposed a data transmission method using an FM sub-channel available to all FM radio stations. Digital data are broadcast to special receivers that may be embedded in appliances or in an energy management controller. There are provisions for authenticating that the data originated from the utility to ensure cyber security. The use of FM broadcasting provides universal real-time coverage throughout the country with messages that can be tailored to each geographic region.

The term IoT fosters the idea that clever things linked to a network result in desirable applications such as entertainment, lighting, environmental control, energy management, health, and safety. Well-designed applications for homes and buildings depend on more than clever things; they require careful systems engineering and attention to the user-experience. Furthermore, an integrated smart home with cooperation among applications is facilitated by designs that conform to standards for interoperability. Building Automation Systems (BAS) for commercial buildings have been evolving about two orders of magnitude slower than home systems. This paper examines the elements of building automation systems with a focus on the benefits and risks of adopting IoT for these buildings.

This paper explores alternative approaches for companies to develop IoT engineering specifications for use in the home systems and building automation industries. A single company might publish specifications hoping to dominate a market as the first with a conforming product. Companies might collaborate in a consortium formed to foster market expansion. The well-established route is to propose an official standard, produced by a Standards Developing Organization (SDO) where participation is open to the public and formal maintenance procedures have been published. Some SDOs were established more than a century ago with broad support worldwide.

Multimedia is being integrated into a diversity of commercial settings. These applications require an integrated infrastructure for distributing audio, video, and control from sources such as videodiscs, media servers, broadcasts, and Internet streams to displays. This paper describes HDBaseT™, a technology for distributing high-quality multimedia in commercial buildings that is cost-effective and easily installed without special cables, connectors, or additional training.

Building control systems have been evolving slowly since the introduction of the thermostat in the 1880s. A diversity of applications has been developed independently for building services such as comfort control, energy management, lighting, public address, signage, security, elevators and escalators, and power management. Many of these use different communications resulting in attempts at interconnecting building automation systems like mixing “apples and oranges.” This paper examines how will the building automation industry is attempting to achieve interoperability.

Since buildings account for almost two-thirds of national electricity consumption, smart grid programs should have a significant impact on building, but not yet. For now, building managers are focusing on energy conservation measures and just starting to learn about smart grids. Dr. Wacks was chosen to manage a CABA research project on this topic plus an investigation into adoption of designs for net-zero energy buildings.

The traditional electric utility consists of a few generating stations supplying power to millions of customers through a radial (tree-like) grid of long-distance transmission and local distribution lines. The introduction of renewables (such as wind and solar) and storage may result in a very different energy system. Consumers may become prosumers as they produce energy and sell the excess to their neighbors and to a community microgrid. The tools for this sales-process and for moving power locally will be based on Transactive Energy. Ascertaining costs in a distributed grid is a pre-requisite for creating a market for distributed energy resources (DER).

Renewable energy resources such as wind and solar produce power that varies with the weather and time-of-day. Sometimes more power is produced than can be used locally, so some utilities buy the excess power and allow it to be fed onto the electric grid. As renewable production reaches about 30% of total power needs in a region, renewable sources could impact the business of utility power production and the technology of power distribution via the grid. The GridWise Architecture Council, a committee of 13 smart grid experts appointed by the United States Department of Energy, is proposing Transactive Energy as a new business and technology approach to managing the proliferation of renew-able power generation by customers, while maintaining grid stability.

Renewable energy resources such as wind and solar produce power that varies with the weather and time-of-day. Sometimes more power is produced than can be used locally, so some utilities buy the excess power and allow it to be fed onto the electric grid. As renewable production reaches about 30% of total power needs in a region, renewable sources could impact the business of utility power production and the technology of power distribution via the grid. The GridWise Architecture Council, a committee of 13 smart grid experts appointed by the United States Department of Energy, is proposing Transactive Energy as a new business and technology approach to managing the proliferation of renew-able power generation by customers, while maintaining grid stability.

The GridWise Architecture Council view expands the domain of the electricity system to include end-devices and incorporates information technology (IT). IT is expected to revolutionize planning and operation of the power grid just as it has changed business, education, and entertainment. Dr. Wacks was asked by the GridWise Architecture Council to lead a working group at NIST to write a report about the goals and structure of a demand response system for residential customers. An overview of demand response is included in this paper.

The development of a smart grid has been an evolving process of enhancing the existing electric grid. In the early 1990s, there was a realization that there might be limits to growth in the supply of electricity. Among the public concerns were siting of generator plants and transmission lines, nuclear power risks, and an emerging green movement. Public regulators urged utilities to consider integrated resource planning that included both supply and demand. Smart grid activities of the Departments of Energy and Commerce are highlighted, including the establishment of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel.