PassiveLogic Leads Launch of Quantum Alliance To Advance New Building Autonomy Standard

With support from the US Department of Energy, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Brookfield, PassiveLogic, the world’s first platform for creating autonomous buildings, announced the launch of the Quantum Alliance — a cooperative effort between public and private entities to move the building industry toward full autonomy. The Quantum 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 and co-founder of 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.”

Launched to support the Quantum Standard, the Quantum Alliance is creating a roadmap to a future digital ecosystem that includes real-time building controls. In forming this coalition, PassiveLogic will collaborate directly with key partners, including Belimo, Automation Components, Inc., 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.

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“This partnership addresses the needs of a unique cross-section of stakeholders,” said Brookfield Asset Management’s Judah Siegel of the Quantum Alliance. “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 analogs.”

Whole-Building Description for Full Autonomy

Led by PassiveLogic’s Autonomous Systems & A.I. Engineer, Dr. Majid Karami, PhD, 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 Dr. 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 labeling. What’s missing,” Dr. Karami added, “is physics coupled to controls running at the edge. Autonomy needs to live at the edge.”

“We realize we need a digital twin solution,” said Rich Simons of Bradford White, “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.”

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Connects Existing Standards with a Building Level API

Buildings generate large amounts of data in proprietary languages, and as a consequence extracting and using that information is cumbersome. Quantum is an existential definition — a new kind of standard — that fundamentally 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 analog interfaces — and contextualizes 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 easy access to building-level data. Quantum enables the world’s first building-level API.

The future of smart energy grids is dependent 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 analyzing and diagnosing failures within its systems — a building that alerts humans to equipment failures, rather than the other way around — is a critical component of future infrastructure.

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