To accelerate an ecosystem for autonomous buildings, the Quantum Alliance has been set up to unify manufacturers, commercial real estate, building controls and government partners around a common standard.

With support from the US Department of Energy, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Brookfield, PassiveLogic, a platform for creating autonomous buildings, has launched the Quantum Alliance, a cooperative effort between public and private entities to move the building industry towards full autonomy.

The alliance aims to develop an industry-spanning consensus known as the Quantum Standard. This standard defines physics-based digital twins that enable complete building autonomy.

“To build the future, it’s critical to have a language for autonomous systems,” said Troy Harvey, CEO of Utah-based PassiveLogic and architect of the Quantum Standard. “We see industry and institutional collaborations as crucial in driving the Quantum Standard to adoption and widespread application, in conjunction with the platform PassiveLogic has created to enable full autonomy.”

The alliance is creating a roadmap to a digital ecosystem that includes real-time building controls. In forming this coalition, PassiveLogic will collaborate directly with partners, including Belimo, Automation Components and Bradford White, in addition to Brookfield, to gain an understanding of virtually everything in buildings – every valve, every wire, every duct, every person – enabling a system capable of interactive autonomy.

“This partnership addresses the needs of a unique cross-section of stakeholders,” said Brookfield Asset Management’s Judah Siegel. “The shift to a connected world, where objects in the physical world are controlled by virtual counterparts, makes it important for digital facsimiles to have a deep understanding of the objects they represent, and how they interact with other real-world analogues.”

Led by PassiveLogic’s autonomous systems and AI engineer Majid Karami, the Quantum Alliance allows buildings to move beyond real-time sequencing (level four) and into full autonomy (level five). Currently, no technology in building automation goes beyond level one autonomy.

“There’s digital twins, and there’s digital twins,” said Karami. “In new construction, you may get a BIM file that is post-processed and tags are added; in retrofit scenarios, you’ll get a BACnet point discovery, and apply heuristics to point labelling. What’s missing is physics coupled to controls running at the edge. Autonomy needs to live at the edge.”

Rich Simons of Bradford White added: “We realise we need a digital twin, and a partnership within the Quantum Alliance allows for that. They have a team of physicists who can describe and capture the physical outputs of our equipment: flow, conduction, resistance, all of it. We see the Quantum partnership as a route to getting our products specced into more projects.”

Buildings generate large amounts of data in proprietary languages and, as a consequence, extracting and using that information is cumbersome. Quantum is a new kind of standard that bridges the gap to all existing semantic protocols. It is designed to be interoperable with languages and protocols including International Foundation Class (IFC), EnergyPlus, Haystack, Brick, BACnet, Bluetooth Mesh and legacy analogue interfaces, and contextualises them with a physics-based understanding.

This level of interoperability enables the creation of building-level apps, with implications for IoT and smart grids and the whole field of building analytics. Lack of access to a building’s data has prevented this expertise from being scalable. However, this is no longer the case. Quantum will be released as an open-source standard, allowing data to be queried and explored at a high level, and creating access to building-level data. It is said to enable the world’s first building-level API.

The future of smart energy grids depends on autonomous buildings that can behave as independent agents in smart networks. In other words, bringing full autonomy to buildings is a smart grid requirement. An intelligent, autonomous building with in-situ AI and system controls, capable of learning from its environment, and analysing and diagnosing failures within its systems – a building that alerts humans to equipment failures, rather than the other way around – can be a critical component of future infrastructure.

Founded in 2016, PassiveLogic says it has developed a way to cut energy consumption by one-third by making building controls truly intelligent.