A New Level in Building Integration

Nov 1, 2004 12:00 PM, by MICHAEL FICKES

Over the next year or two, a new Internet capability called Web services will transform the way security directors use technology to provide and manage security. Web services will facilitate interoperability between devices such as intelligent controllers manufactured by two different access control vendors. Web services will also enable diverse building control systems such as heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, lighting systems and access control systems to swap data and automate operational decisions.

Eventually, Web services may provide building managers with correlated security and building operations data that may suggest strategies for improving a building's operating efficiencies. For example, by tracking the number of people working in each office and conference room in a building and comparing that data with the operation of the HVAC system for a year, security and facility directors might learn something that will help minimize a company's utility bills.

How important are Web services going to be? Even IT executives struggle to define the full potential of this powerful new technology. “I don't think we've absorbed how dramatically this is going to change the IT industry,” says Bilhar Mann, vice president of eTrust Security Solutions Group with Computer Associates of Islandia, N.Y.

A recent white paper from security supplier Hirsch Electronics Corp., Santa Ana, Calif., describes the promise of Web services:

“Imagine the following scenario. A tenant or employee enters their building after hours by presenting a card to a reader, or entering a code on the keypad, at the main entrance. At that point several things happen. The door unlocks. The HVAC system is notified that the individual's office on the 5th floor needs to have its temperature set points changed to normal occupancy values so the individual is comfortable when they arrive. The lighting system is notified to turn on the appropriate lights for the office area on the 5th floor so the individual feels safe. Property management or the accounting department is notified of the exact time when the individual enters and leaves the building, so they can be billed for after-hours energy usage. Everyone benefits.”

In short, Web services will make computers, servers and microprocessor-controlled devices start, stop and report automatically. “At the moment, each of these different systems must have a (unique) technology to do this,” Mann says. “But Web services will enable one application to talk to other systems in a consistent way. And when new systems come along, you can create new Web services for them.”

The original Web service: browsers

IT experts compare the significance of Web services to the arrival of the World Wide Web a decade ago. Before the Web, there were no Internet browsers. Those in the know used the Internet by operating a host of different programs that could communicate with other computers connected to the Internet. E-mail sent and received messages to other e-mail programs. File Transfer Protocol (FTP) applications downloaded files from other computers that understood FTP. A computer with a program called Gopher could access files on other computers that understood the Gopher language. FTP, however, could not talk to Gopher. The Internet worked, but it was not like surfing the Net. It was more like slogging around in it.

Then came the browser — a software application that consolidated all Internet tools: e-mail, FTP, Gopher and others into the single, powerful point-and-click tool commonly used today.

Here's the important part: When a browser asks another computer or a server for a file, that file includes a special document written in HTML, or hypertext markup language. The HTML document tells the browser how to display the data in the associated file on a computer screen.

Web services take this concept to the next level with a new language called XML or Extensible Markup Language. A page of XML resembles HTML in that it uses plain English and can be written quickly. But XML does much more than HTML. In addition to displaying data in a browser window, XML sends data to and from microprocessor-controlled devices, thus enabling those devices to work in concert.

With XML, an access control system's intelligent boards can share data with the HVAC system controller, the lighting controller and all of the other building control systems. More important, XML combines communications capability with command capability. When the access control system tells the HVAC system that the occupant of office 700 has carded in on Saturday afternoon, the HVAC system responds with a command to its devices: Turn on the heat in office 700.

The facility director, of course, makes the decision to turn on the heat when the occupant of an office arrives on a weekend. XML instructions cause the appropriate security and HVAC devices to implement the decision automatically when preset conditions prevail.

How XML works

Imagine a company organized into two departments: accounting and manufacturing. In this company, each department speaks a different language — Accounting speaks accounting; manufacturing speaks manufacturing. Each department can talk internally and carry out its operations, but the departments cannot communicate with one another and cannot coordinate their work.

Suppose the accountants tell the manufacturers to turn the lights off after work, lest the company go broke paying utility bills for an empty factory. Nothing happens because the request is made in an accounting language incomprehensible to people who only understand the manufacturing language.

Now suppose that the managers of both departments learn a common language called XML. As soon as that happens, the business will operate more efficiently. The bookkeepers complain about the lights in accountant-speak to their manager. The XML-enabled accounting manager talks XML to the manufacturing manager and tells him to turn the lights off after work. The manufacturing manager passes the message along, in the manufacturing language, to his department. The lights go out after work and profits go up.

In the real world, computers, copy machines, fax machines, HVAC and security controllers, lighting systems, fire alarm systems, parking garage systems and other devices speak in different kinds of bit and byte codes. Worse, similar devices made by different manufacturers — DVD video recorders, for instance — often speak their own proprietary bit and byte languages. XML is a common language, one that all microprocessor-controlled devices can be made to understand.

What does it mean to asecurity director?

One might ask: If XML and Web services are so important, why haven't I heard about all of this yet? Complex technologies always spend years incubating in the IT world. In fact, IT people and a few early adopters were using Web browsers years before regular people learned to point and click. Similarly, IT folks have been using and improving XML and Web services for years.

“XML is around five years old,” says Rob Zivney, vice president of marketing with Hirsch Electronics. “But many people are just learning about it. I think we'll begin to see products using XML come to market soon — probably as early as ISC West next spring.”

The IT world agrees. According to a 2004 survey of 437 IT decision-makers by the Boston-based Yankee Group, 48 percent have already developed and implemented Web services of some kind. Another 39 percent plan to introduce Web services in 2005. By the middle of next year, the Yankee Group believes that nearly 80 percent of all enterprises will be using Web services in one or many forms.

Hirsch Electronics ranks among the early adopters of XML. The company's latest version of the Velocity Security Management System application software employs two interoperability strategies. The first is an Application Programming Interface (API) for people and credentials. Second is a Web server with an XML interface for control and response functions. Both the API and XML allow interoperability to extend through the application software to the controllers.

A security department might use the people and credentials API to create an interface between security and the human resources department, Zivney says. With such an interface, a new employee's personal and departmental information could flow automatically from human resources to security, generate a new employee credential authorized for specific door access and print a photo badge. For an employee being terminated, human resources would send data to the security system that would automatically disable the employee's access privileges.

Many industry observers believe that API's will not survive the arrival of XML. “Some programmers refer to Web services as API's,” says Anto Budiardjo, president of Clasma Inc., a Dallas-based marketing, conference and media company specializing in providing services for the building systems and device connectivity industries. “APIs are a way for applications to interface with each other. But APIs are the old way of doing things. XML and Web services are the future.”

For the time being, however, some IT experts believe that APIs that have already been built and tested can handle certain interoperability tasks better. Eventually, XML will take over.

Hirsch's Velocity, for example, has forsaken APIs in favor of XML when it comes to sending security commands to building systems. Velocity will use XML to send triggers to an elevator control system to activate certain floor buttons for an individual presenting a card or activating a unique keypad code. In a hospital application, card swipes by a doctor can use XML to send the names of doctors currently in the building to nursing stations. Alarms and arming status can be posted to a custom display in the command center of a central utilities district via XML.

XML enables the Velocity Web server to receive authenticated commands, accompanied by an XML document, from an outside application. XML also allows Velocity to broadcast selected information to outside sources.

System integrators cheer XML

“I was excited to see that Hirsch is doing this with XML,” says Jeff Houpt, controls division manager with Dowley Inc., an Oklahoma City-based integrator. “It is important because it gives you a way to get these integrations done.”

Currently, Houpt uses something called a hardware bridge to integrate building control systems. “A hardware bridge is a little computer that understands power control data and HVAC control data,” he says. “So I'll go from a power control device into a hardware bridge that converts the data and makes it available to the HVAC controller.”

Houpt must build and program a hardware bridge between every system in an integration project. Next, he will set up a Web server for each control system — power, HVAC, lighting, fire, access control, CCTV and so on. Finally, he'll build HTML pages for each system to enable users to manage the system.

When applications using XML — such as the new Velocity — begin to be written for devices, integrators like Houpt will be able to dispense with hardware bridges and painstaking machine-level programming and simply write XML documents to establish interoperable control functions among building systems.

Similarly, interoperability schemes such as LONworks and BACnet have begun to take advantage of XML. “LONworks devices can talk directly to workstations without using XML,” says Michael Tennefoss, vice president for product marketing with Echelon Corp., Palo Alto, Calif. “But you can also use XML to communicate with applications where that is convenient or appropriate.”

Two years ago, the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers Inc. (ASHRAE) established a working group to explore the application of XML to its systems.

“XML, LONworks, and BACnet are all means to an end,” Zivney says. “The holy grail is interoperability. That's my goal.”

WHAT ABOUT SECURITY IN OPEN XML SYSTEMS?

XML is a tool that opens up network communications between dissimilar systems and enables them to interoperate. Doesn't that expose data and perhaps proprietary information to hackers and other outsiders?

“That's true,” says Bilhar Mann, vice president of the eTrust Security Solutions Group with the Islandia, N.Y.-based Computer Associates International Inc. “When you open up a system with XML you expose standard interfaces.”

“But there are Web services security solutions on the market today,” he continues. “There's nothing special about these security solutions. They use encryption and other security techniques to restrict access to authorized users. But you do have to recognize that security is one part of using Web services.”

FOR THE RECORD…

About the Companies

For information, circle the Reader Service number (listed below) or visit securitysolutions.com

Computer Associates	5
Dowley Inc.	6
Hirsch Electronics Corp.	7

Want to use this article? Click here for options!
© 2008 Penton Media Inc.

This month in Access Control

• Opening Up About Door Closers
• An Enterprise Approach
• The Framework For Open Systems
• On A Higher Plane
• More from April's issue