Small- to medium-sized buildings make up about 94% of all commercial buildings in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, yet only 13% of those buildings have a building automation system.

IEC Systems is a provider of turnkey proprietary and nonproprietary building automation systems (BASs) and a Distech Controls authorized system integrator.

This climate control solution ensures balanced, room-by-room comfort throughout the home.

For more HVAC contractors to sell zoning systems, they have to understand the benefits, challenges, know how to approach customers to even be able to sell it, and then comes the install.

Customers looking for increased value out of their HVAC systems will find high-end features like connectivity, greater efficiency, and more intuitive controls attractive.

Posted by CISA on Mar 21

Posted by CISA on Mar 23

In recent episodes we have discusses statically and dynamically typed languages and domain specific languages - topics that are much talked about in the community at the moment. In this episode we look at the foundation of programming languages : types. We explain what a type actually is, how type systems work and what polymorphism works.

This Episode is a round table discussion about Ultra-Large Scale Systems. In 2006, a number of authors (among them our guests Linda Northrop, Doug Schmidt, Kevin Sullivan, and Gregor Kiczales) have produced a report that addressed the following question: Given the issues with today's software engineering, how can we build the systems of the future that are likely to have billions of lines of code? In this episode, our guests discuss many of the issues that arise from this kind of system and provide an overview of the research areas that should be investigated in order to tackle the challenge. If you want to get more detailed information, you can read the ULS Report (PDF).

In this Episode we talked about the new POSA 4 book which has recently been published. We talk to two of the authors, Kevlin Henney and Frank Buschmann (the third author, Doug Schmidt was not available - and he had also been on the podcast a couple of times :-)). The book contains a pattern language for distributed systems. It contains 114 patterns that had been published before by many different other authors. The patterns have been rewritten to form a consistent language. We basically talked through the different sections of the book, which gives a really good overview over the challenges and the solutions of building distributed systems. These sections include From Mud to Structure, Distribution Infrastructure, Event Demultiplexing and Dispatching, Interface Partitioning, Component Patitioning, Application Contrl, Concurrency, Synchronization, Object Interaction, Adaptazion and Extension, Modal Behaviour, Resource Management and finally, Database Access. The book references several other previous works (as listed below). Interestingly, many of these referenced works and authors have also been discussed previously on the podcast. Here are the back references:

• Domain Driven Design, Eric Evans
• Messaging Patterns, Gregor Hohpe
• POSA 2 Patterns, Doug Schmidt
• Concurrency: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and the interview with Goetz and Holmes
• Remoting Patterns Part 1 and Part 2
• POSA3, Resource Management

This episode is an introduction to embedded system. It is an introduction in the sense that we cover many topics very briefly: upcoming episodes will provides details for many of these topics. We start by discussing what an embedded system is an what the important characteristics are. Among them is limited resources, concurrency, real time and hardware integration. We also discuss the range of embedded systems from small mirocontrollers to mobile phones to distributed real time embedded systems. We also cover the different business case for embedded systems (per unit cost) and some non-trivial developmental aspects (cross compilation debugging, heisenbugs). We close the episode by discussing some important architectural styles (time triggered, event-based, microkernels, state machines) as well as tools of the trade: languages, operating systems and middleware.

This episode is a conversation with Bruce Powel Douglass on real time systems. We started by discussing what real time software is, and explored the difference between hard and soft real time. We then looked at different scheduling strategies, and the meaning of terms like urgency and importance in the context of scheduling. Next was a discussion of typical architectural styles for real time systems and how architectures are described in this context. This led us to a discussion about the importance of modeling, formalisms and languages as well as the role of automatic code generation from those models. We then looked at how to model QoS aspects and the role of SysML for modeling real time systems. We then had a brief look at which programming languages are used these days for real time systems and the role of static analysis to determine various properties of those programs in advance. The last part of the discussion focused on some best practices for building real time systems, the challenges in distributed real time systems and how real time systems can be tested effectively.

This episode is a conversation with Jan Bosch about product line engineering (PLE). Jan has worked in various roles and industries and academia in the context of product lines. In this episode we look at Jan's view of what is next for product lines: software ecosystems. What is their relationship to PLE and how should PLE change to remain relevant?

Recording Venue: Phone Guest: Steve Will IBM i (formerly known as OS/400) is an advanced object-based operating system by IBM that runs thousands of businesses around the world.  Steve Will, the Chief Architect of IBM i speaks with us about the history, technical features, and underlying architecture discussing the concepts of Single Level Store, integrated […]

Recording Venue: WebEx Guest: Wil van der Aalst Robert Blumen interviews Professor Wil van der Aalst of the Technical University of Eindhoven, one of the world’s leading researchers in business process management and workflow systems. Professor van der Aalst leads off with an overview of the main concepts in the field business processes, business process […]

Leslie Lamport won a Turing Award in 2013 for his work in distributed and concurrent systems. He also designed the document preparation tool LaTex. Leslie is employed by Microsoft Research, and has recently been working with TLA+, a language that is useful for specifying concurrent systems from a high level. The interview begins with a […]

Robert talks to Dr. Anil Madhavapeddy of the Cambridge University (UK) Systems research group about the OCaml language and the Mirage cloud operating system, a microkernel written entirely in OCaml. The outline includes: history of the evolution from dedicated servers running a monolithic operating system to virutalized servers based on the Xen hypervisor to micro-kernels; […]

Senior performance architect and author of *Systems Performance* Brendan Gregg talks with Robert Blumen about systems performance: how the hardware and OS layers affect application behavior. The discussion covers the scope of systems performance, systems performance in the software life cycle, the role of performance analysis in architecture, methodologies for solving performance problems, dynamic tracing and tracing tools such as DTrace, the disk and file subsystems, the CPU and memory subsystems, and the challenges virtualization poses for performance analysts.

Stefan Tilkov talks to Camille Fournier about the challenges developers face when building distributed systems, whether the can avoid building them at all, and what changes occur once they do.

Donny Nadolny of PagerDuty joins Robert Blumen to tell the story of debugging an issue that PagerDuty encountered when they set up a Zookeeper cluster that spanned across two geographically separated datacenters in different regions.

John Allspaw CTO of Etsy speaks with Robert Blumen about systemic failures and outages. Why they cannot be totally prevented, how to respond, and what we can learn from them.

James Cowling of Dropbox tells Robert Blumen about their massive migration from Amazon’s S3 to their own distributed storage system.

Tim Coulter, the founder of Truffle (Ethereum DApp development framework) discusses the Truffle framework for Ethereum SmartContracts and Decentralized App development. Kishore Bhatia spoke with Tim Coulter about: Ethereum Decentralized Apps (DApps)...

Learn how to simplify your application architecture with the introduction of a messaging system. You'll hear how different messaging patterns can make your application more flexible, easier to maintain, and improve its performance.

Bob Kepford discusses Decoupled CMS. Many CMS practitioners are adopting a decoupled approach to improve scale, allow for more specialized roles, and to separate data collection from delivery. Host Jeff Doolittle spoke with Kepford about what makes a Decoupled CMS different.

Nikhil Krishna speaks with Dietrich Ayala about IPFS in depth. They cover what it is, how it works in detail and how one could leverage IPFS and libp2p in one's own application or to host one's content. The discussion goes into the IPFS ecosystem...

Gryphon is a relatively new company aiming to challenge the establishment of consumer-grade networking. We check out the Gryphon Tower today, which aims to combine extensive network security features with excellent performance, mesh network compatibility, and ease of installation and monitoring!... [PCSTATS]

AI is trained on data from our health care system as it exists, which means the data is contaminated by racial, economic, and regional disparities. But there are solutions.

Nowadays, it seems that everything we do tends to be somehow automated. The very same is happening in electrical distribution systems. The distribution system at the medium voltage (MV) or low voltage (LV) levels is designed using different structures such... Read more

The post The essentials of automation applied to distribution systems via PLCs, SCADA, IEDs, and RTUs appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

Communication systems of electric utilities have become increasingly critical to electric system protection, operation, and maintenance. For fast tripping and clearing of system faults, communication-aided relaying has become a common protection scheme, particularly in line protection. Control centers depend on... Read more

The post Schematics and docs needed for communication systems of substation protective relaying system appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

Electrical distribution systems comprise a large number of remote applications and locations, and it has traditionally been challenging to monitor and regulate these remote applications and sites. Utility companies have been installing remote terminal/telemetry units, often known as RTUs, at... Read more

The post Three most common SCADA applications in MV/LV distribution systems you SHOULD know appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

It's unbelievable that 2016 is here and the school year is half over, but that also means we are closer to the busiest time of year for those of us in the assessment industry.

I hope everyone has created and follows a secure assessment policy, but if not, John Kleeman, founder of Questionmark, created Ten tips for Securing Your Assessment System, which provides a secure foundation for your assessment system.  It seems security breaches most often occur as we get busy and are more prone to creating shortcuts in our work, but a "system" should help minimize these errors.  Please read John's post in its entirety and address any weaknesses in your assessment security:

What can you do to make your assessment system more secure? How can you avoid a disruptive data breach where people’s personal information is disclosed? Using a vendor who takes security seriously reduces risk, as I wrote in my blog article Eight ways to check if security is more than skin deep. But security involves both vendor and user. This post gives ten good practice tips on how you as a user or administrator of an assessment system can reduce the risk of data breaches.

1. Don’t give yourself or other administrators unnecessary privileges. Follow the principle of least privilege. It may sound counter-intuitive, but most administrative users don’t need access to all capabilities and data within your system. Limiting access reduces the impact of a data breach if an account is compromised or someone makes a mistake. If you are using Questionmark, allocate appropriate roles to limit people to what they need.

2. When someone leaves the project or organization, remove their access. Don’t allow someone who has left your team to still have access to your assessment data.

3. Follow good password security. Do not share passwords between people. Do not use the same password for two accounts. Choose strong passwords and change them periodically. If someone asks you for your password, never, ever give it. And if a web page doesn’t look right, don’t type your password into it.

4. Install all the patches and secure the system. A common cause of security breaches is failing to install the latest versions of software, and attackers exploit known vulnerabilities. You need to be proactive and always install the latest version of system and application software, set up good technical security and follow the vendor’s recommendations.

If you haven’t got the time or resources to do this properly, move to a cloud solution. In a cloud SaaS solution like Questionmark OnDemand, the vendor is responsible for updating Windows, updating the application, monitoring security and ensuring that everything is up to date.

5. Install good quality antivirus / anti-malware software. Reportedly there are nearly a million new or variant malware and viruses produced each day. Protect your computer and those of your co-workers with up to date, professional software to address this threat.

6. Protect any downloaded data. Questions, assessments and reports on results are generally safer on a server or in an on-demand service than on a workstation. If you need to download data locally, set up security procedures to protect it and try to ensure that any download is temporary only.

7. Dispose of data properly. Deleting a file on a computer doesn’t erase the data, it simply erases the index to it. If you use a reputable service like Questionmark OnDemand, if a disk is repaired or reaches end of life, it will be securely destroyed for example by degaussing. But if you download data locally or use installable software to manage your assessments, you need to do this yourselves. A recent study suggested that about half of used hard drives sold online contain residual data. Make sure this is not your assessment data!

8. Be careful about clicking on a link or attachment in an email. Phishing attacks use email or malicious websites (clicking on a link) to collect sensitive information or infect your machine with malware and viruses. Such attacks could even be aimed at your organization or assessment activity directly (this is called spear phishing!). Think before clicking.

9. Be aware of social engineering. Social engineering is when someone tries to trick you or someone else into a security breach. For example someone might ring up and claim to be a student who wants their results, but really is an imposter. Or someone might spoof an email from your boss asking for the questions for the next test to review. Be wary of strange phone calls or emails that ask for something urgent. If something seems suspicious, clear it with a security professional before you give them info or ask a caller to hang up and call them back on an official number.

10. Conduct security awareness training. If you’re not already doing this, organize training sessions for all your authors, proctors, administrators and other users to help them be security aware. if you can, deliver tests after the training to check understanding. Sharing this blog article with your co-workers would be a great way to start.

To see more Questionmark posts click HERE.

The auxiliary DC control power system is considered the most crucial element of a protection, control, and monitoring system. The failure of the direct current (DC) control power can result in the inability of fault detection devices to identify faults,... Read more

The post Auxiliary DC power system used for fault detection, trip coils and remote operation appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

To be honest, transmission and distribution networks are full of problems. But that’s nothing new, and you already knew that. This technical article will shed some light on solving some pretty severe problems in transmission and distribution networks by using... Read more

The post Controlling power system parameters through reactive power (VAr) compensation appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

A lighting control system is to be developed. The system will be controlled by four switches, SWITCH1, SWITCH2, SWITCH3, and SWITCH4. These switches will control the lighting in a room based on the following criteria: Any of three of the... Read more

The post Let’s develop the simple PLC program for lighting control system appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

There are a lot of opportunities to optimise lighting system in (almost) any industrial facility. Seven practical energy-efficiency opportunities to reduce energy use cost-effectively are given below: Lighting controls Replace T-12 tubes by T-8 tubes Replace mercury lights with metal halide or... Read more

The post 7 energy-efficiency improvement opportunities in lighting system appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

This technical article discusses criteria and requirements for designing protection systems for busbars in HV/EHV networks. One of the most critical requirements is reliable busbar relay protection to assure power system integrity during fault conditions. This requirement is further emphasized because... Read more

The post Design issues in HV busbar protection systems (substation topology and DC power supply) appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

This technical article we will go through a number of existing applications for conducting a wide range of electrical studies. However, the practice says that studies involving load flow and fault analyses are the most commonly utilized programs in power transmission... Read more

The post Eleven most important calculations you can perform with power system analysis software appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

First, let’s say a word or two about the essentials of power distribution systems for our young electrical engineers. An electric distribution system, or distribution plant as it is sometimes called, is all of that part of an electric power... Read more

The post The loop electrical distribution system used to supply bulk loads (industrial plants and buildings) appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

Many young engineers consider cement plants pretty complicated because of their weird technology. The reason probably lies in the fact that you cannot understand all those technologies unless you worked in such a plant and saw all processes from scratch.... Read more

The post The essentials of electrical systems in cement plants appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

The countries of the European Economic Area (EEA) have agreed on common minimum regulatory requirements in order to ensure the free movement of products within the EEA. The CE marking indicates that the product works in conformity with the directives... Read more

The post EN61800-3 (IEC1800-3) – Adjustable speed electrical power drive systems appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

Jet Pumps are mounted above ground and lift the water out of the ground through a suction pipe. Jets are popular in areas with high water tables and warmer climates. There are two categories of jet pumps and pump selection... Read more

The post Jet pumps used for private well systems or low flow irrigation applications appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

Efficiencies of fan systems vary considerably across impeller types. The average energy saving potential in these systems in the U.S. manufacturing industry is estimated at 6%. For optimal savings and performance, it is recommended that a systems approach is used.... Read more

The post Six energy efficiency improvement opportunities in fan systems appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

Instrumentation consumes large amounts of compressed air at many individual locations in a textile plant, but these uses are susceptible to leakage. Most such leaks are at threaded connection points, rubber hose connections, valves, regulators, seals, and in old pneumatic... Read more

The post Eleven energy-efficiency improvement opportunities in compressed air systems appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

In many buildings, HVAC is the first or second item in terms of energy costs. This technical article deals with optimisation tips and energy efficiency savings in heating systems of a building. Heating systems have always been used when the... Read more

The post 8 actions to improve energy efficiency in heating systems appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

– Array Size: 10, 12-volt, 51-watt modules; Isc= 3.25 amps, Voc= 20.7 volts – Batteries: 800 amp-hours at 12 volts – Loads: 5 amps DC and 500-watt inverterwith 90% efficiency. The PV modules are mounted on the roof. Single-conductor cables... Read more

The post Calculation Example of Small Photovoltaic (PV) Residential Stand-Alone System appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

Researches so far shows that, by 2020, around 20% of the total energy production worldwide will be generated from renewable energy. But the major problem with the standalone system is that the sources are not continuous. This intermittent nature of... Read more

The post Low voltage ride through in grid connected hybrid renewable energy systems appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

A dizzying array of new energy technologies are reaching or nearing the marketplace. Newer choices to generate electricity include fuel cells, wind turbines, solar cells and microturbines. Energy storage is approaching practicality, for example through reversible fuel cells and flywheels.... Read more

The post In Front Of The Third Electrical Systems Revolution in United States appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.