Most businesses want to operate at scale. Making scale work while continuing to drive efficiency within buildings requires keeping variable costs under control—heating, cooling, and other energy strains. For that, you need data from energy and temperature sensors.
The data that these sensors produce is incredibly valuable, but the sheer amount of data generated can become difficult to manage and understand quickly. It can grow to unwieldy levels fast. For example, suppose that in a building there are 10 to 20 sensors per floor for 60 floors (600 – 1200 sensors) measured over 365 days. Scale that over 20, 100, even 1,000 buildings, and you can see how managing this data and making it understandable to building managers, regulators, and the finance department requires significant man hours. To understand and work with this massive quantity of real-time data efficiently, many companies turn to digital solutions.
If you’re a software engineer at one of these companies building out a digital solution, you need to be able to funnel this vast amount of data into easy-to-digest dashboards and reports. Traditionally, this means building out a data pipeline that aggregates the individual sensor readings in a data warehouse, cleaning and standardizing it in a custom ETL pipeline, and then storing it in a data lake that your dashboard software can pull from. Getting this in place means you’ve become responsible for multiple technologies (databases and data manipulation tools) as well as the infrastructure that they run on.
Digitization of connected devices has not only made plenty of buildings more sustainable and efficient but has also helped boost business operational efficiency. At Schneider Electric, we think if we can make this operational data easier to manage and easier to access through simple, standardized APIs, everyone can transform their companies into sustainable data-driven organizations. Our Schneider Electric Exchange platform does the hard work for you, and our open APIs built on top of our EcoStruxure software can export the data to where you need it.
In this article, I’ll cover the ways that simple API access to your data can help you and your partners create better software solutions.
Marrying traceability and sustainability through data
The fight against climate change and towards a more sustainable world is won with data. Schneider Electric is primarily a hardware company, but all of its hardware creates a treasure trove of data. We work with data scientists around the world to maximize the translation of sustainability and energy knowledge into productized APIs that anyone can use to turn data into easy insights. Ta.
Data comes from a variety of sources, so supporting all of these sources is essential. This includes non-Schneider sensors as well. You can ingest data through other protocols, whether it’s MQTT or any type of disparate protocol. We tried using existing protocols and formats, but found that one size does not fit all and that in some cases we needed to create a custom data pipeline. We continue to enhance our use cases because each business has unique requirements. We can’t do this alone. We leverage the expertise of our industry partners. Businesses need reliable and detailed data, so we provide easy access to his IoT infrastructure with millions of data points in one building. We strive to be more open and welcome more developers into his IoT world by building a digital interface on the Exchange developer portal that removes the complexity of IoT infrastructure.
Schneider hardware or software installed in the field is natively connected to the cloud through intelligent edge platforms and gateways. Depending on the speed you need, you can run analytics close to your users on the edge or in the cloud.
Let’s look at a simple automation example. In office spaces, unoccupied spaces may not require as much heating or cooling. Most organizations provide their own calendars for conference rooms. Call the calendar app’s API to see a list of meetings in the room, or use the EcoStruxure API to configure efficient heating and cooling schedules that keep the room at a comfortable temperature only when people are present. You can do that.
Our EcoStruxure Energy and Sustainability Scoring API is a unique interface for software developers who want easy access to energy and sustainability performance scores for sites with compatible EcoStruxure systems.
import requests
site_id = "YOUR_site-id_PARAMETER"
url = " + site_id + "/scoring-requests"
headers = "Authorization": "Bearer <YOUR_TOKEN_HERE>"
response = requests.post(url, headers=headers)
data = response.json()
print(data)However, you’re not necessarily the only one who needs this information. You’ll want to share this data with regulators and partners, and we’re building those endpoints as well.
Proving and improving sustainability through data sharing
Achieving sustainability requires significant investment from organizations seeking it. For an organization to claim to be sustainable, it usually requires attestation by a reliable auditor who follows known standards. One of the major certifications is the Leadership in Energy Efficiency Design (LEED) certification issued by the U.S. Green Building Council. Although LEED is primarily a design tool, the certification was developed to prove that a building complies with the standard. LEED covers all building types and all construction phases. LEED for Building Operations and Maintenance (O+M) specifically requires building operational data for certification.
The authentication process used to be very manual. The auditor spends several days collecting building data, FTPs it to the U.S. Green Building Council in an approved format, and waits several more days for a response. But now that the U.S. Green Building Council is a customer of our data platform, certification has become a consent management issue for our other customers. Select the data you want to share, agree to share your data with others, and click Send. Our real estate partner certified 3,000 buildings in just three clicks. That’s the power of data sharing.
We take the security and privacy of these shared APIs very seriously, because easy access to data is very powerful. With great power comes great responsibility. Design each API for your specific use case so that it provides the right amount of data. APIs for partners provide a more limited set of data than data for data owners. While the data owner may need detailed data on all construction jobs, the scoring partner only needs data related to certification. This is the same data you collect from on-site collection, only faster.
All of our data products use OAuth2 and single sign-on to manage customer access. These credentials cannot be shared with partners, so we use Personal Access Tokens (PATs) to authorize any partner APIs that the owner can generate. This way, even if these credentials are compromised, the damage is limited to the access granted to the partner. PAT can be canceled at any time.
These partner APIs can be used if you need to provide access to partners outside your organization. It could be another organization that develops software for you, a supply chain partner, or anything else you can think of.
If you can think of a use case that we haven’t thought of yet, please let us know.
Shape the future of an open API community
We’ve done a lot of work on the Exchange data platform, including developing analytics, creating ingestion pipelines for various data formats, and developing APIs to quickly deliver insights. But we’re not just open, we want more than data from our devices. Our analysis can always get better, more complex, more tailored, more fine-tuned, and closer to reality. And our API is constantly improving.
However, we are not in the business intelligence dashboard market as there are many great dashboards out there. Our APIs are developed to address use cases that we’ve heard of before, but not all of them. This is where it comes into play. If you need different data via the API, please let us know. We are experts at EcoStruxure, but you know your needs and business better than we do.
The same goes for analysis. We have created some analysis packages that we think are very good. Our Virtual Sensor Failure Detection (VSFD) analysis uses machine learning to determine if a sensor is overheating, damaged by dirt, or otherwise failing to register the correct temperature . Our building energy modeling analysis creates a building’s “thermal signature” (the energy required by the building given the outside temperature) to help run simulations and discover improvements. But we know that smart developers are using our data platform to create analytics we never thought of. That’s why we created the Exchange Marketplace.
Sustainability poses big challenges and offers opportunities for those who solve them. Exchange aims to simplify understanding the data you need to address your challenges, and give you the opportunity to share (and monetize) the solutions you come up with. Digitalization and sustainability represent a new world.
