Properly designed and implemented sequences for building control can dramatically improve the energy efficiency, comfort and safety of commercial buildings. Unfortunately the process to develop, document, implement, and support these sequences is complicated and error prone and as a result many buildings operate sub-optimally. Building Intelligence Group helped to define and lead a program called “Open Building Control” that is working to resolve this issue. The program is centered at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and is funded by the US Department of Energy and others. The project is focused on a digital process that will allow designers to select high performance sequences, measure how effective they can be through simulations, then provide documentation to the contractor in a digital format called the “Control Description Language” or CDL. The use of CDL enables the ability to easily model the efficiency of control sequences, check for errors in design, and to translate or compile the logic into code that can be used on commercial controllers.
The definition of CDL has been completed as an open source project and the results can be found at https://obc.lbl.gov/specification/cdl.html .
The next step is to work with industry to review what has been created for CDL and to develop what will become a US and eventually international standard. Moving this to a standard provides the potential to gain broad industry acceptance so that designers, suppliers, servicing contractors, and owners can benefit from a consistent method to define and document control system logic.
The American Society of Heating Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) is an ANSI standards organization and they have agreed to start a committee to create a standard based on CDL. Paul Ehrlich from Building Intelligence Group has been asked to lead this project, which should start in the Summer of 2020.
Members are needed to participate in the standards project. More information about the project can be found in this presentation.