Replace, Repair, Upgrade, Other Pathways.

You have had "old reliable" for ten years and you are unsure about whether to replace, repair or upgrade. Usually issue comes down to cost benefit analysis. And are there other options which you have not even considered?

Even if one has decided to do something like Continuous Monitoring or Lifecycle Management of the unit (because one has a programme for all units), the choice is still hard.

One craves data to inform decision, but a study or upgrade may be needed to even get data. That costs too.

A. Get a study. Or hook directly to remote monitoring. Externals are involved and that can cost. For too many reasons to list herein... that often will not work.

B. Replace it with modern gear and start fresh. Hard to argue with that. And if it can be gotten through - golden. But one will never know what was thrown away... and it will be questioned.

C. Repair and Upgrade. This is a trick option. When one is in the process of doing repairs, it always makes sense to do an upgrade. But you are at the mercy of the contractors who do this work. However often it is the best value. 

D. Give it a born again experience - warts and all. This last one was once as expensive as all of the above, and at least as much trouble.

What if you could magically turn dumb old reliable into a smart new system with self diagnosis. Not saying that we fix old reliable yet, or even have it mend its ways. Just make it talk. Just make it self aware.

That was just not an option as little as five years ago. It was expensive. Only the manufacturer or installer of old reliable could do such magic and their incentive was always to replace and repair first and ask questions later. Upgrade to self awareness often gets value engineered out of the process.

But think about what

• - NEST does for your furnace and AC system.
• - RESA Power Systems does for old switchgear.
• - Any OBD-II monitor can do for your car (insurance).
• - Eaton PXG600E does for a Westinghouse metering system.
• - Roku, Chromecast (or similar) does for your home entertainment system.

The age arises where you buy a "rebirth" box for old reliable: Hook the box onto old reliable (with sensors and wires to what little smarts old reliable has). Hook the box onto your existing network (and we all have networks - even if we do not think about them). Analyze old reliable with Internet tools.

Past ages made such a rebirth box expensive because:

• A. The box hardware was expensive. A PLC is thousands.
• B. The setup of the box was expensive. System engineering is just plain expensive... again in the thousands.
• C. Maintaining the box was expensive. The ecosystem of data exchange and support required massive organizations.
• D. The box (because of hardware, setup and ecosystem costs) was made to do everything possible - but not one thing well.

The key is in the economics of chips, simple interfaces, auto-configuration, and supporting ecosystem that have come from  the explosion in mobile devices. And the mantra of doing what it should do well is finally coming.

I like the idea of reuse. It turns the installed base into an opportunity instead of a liability. And it is good for everyone. I like the idea of a smart device. David Rose - Enhchanted Objects. I like the idea of this being magic.

The Seven C's of Analysis.

Feeling adrift in the topic of analytics and data science?

There are two types of people in the world - Those who categorize and those who do not. There are many categorizations around analytics. Model based, Predictive, etc...

Five cases or levels of analysis - Decriptive, Diagnostic, Discovery, Predictive and Prescriptive - are often listed. Analyses are done on Big Data, Small Data, Rich Data and so on. Data gets classified by Velocity, Volume, Variety, Veracity and Value (5V).

What is the definition of analysis?
:Examination of structure as a basis for interpretation: is a fair working definition. The process or action definition is tantamount to taking inputs and ideas and turning them into decision and deliverables.

So how does analysis work? In the real and theory world? Past, present and future? Note that even asking the question involves a bit of analysis - deciding that time, space, quality and value are important parameters in our discussion.

Back to the seven C's. (three Chi's and four K's). Three are old:

Cheat: Know the answer for certain apriori. Like the Sting.  Or like doing the Kaggle Titanic competition from a download of the historical list of survivors. Or edX or Coursera students who use a shadow account to get the answers.

Chance: Guess the answer randomly... Not based on any "knowledge".

Chestnuts: Use rules of thumb, experts and one's gut. Experts can be consultants, practitioners, or highest paid person opinions (HIPPO). 

The next four are actually what most would call based in data science.

Coordinations: Statistics and regressions against well known dependent variables like space, time and value. f(t,x,y,z).. Note the nuance versus correlation below.

Correlations: f(v) for any vector v. - emergence - and not just related to time and space connections. Anything can be connected to anything else... in any way.

Crowd: Gather wisdom from many actors and models. Maybe using rule of thumb, or gut or any of the others, but getting it right(er) by law of averaging. Boosting might even be clumped into this crowd - so to speak.

Continuous: Iterate and apply the above in real world. Not quite like the others, this is about how the analytics get generated and acted upon. Most of the above answer the call when the need arises. They do not have "instinct" building (aka a built-in instinct) nor a process per se.

Continuous Monitoring Based Commissioning.

Article regarding Continuous Monitoring Based Commissioning.
http://w3.usa.siemens.com/buildingtechnologies/us/en/Smart_Buildings/Documents/the-12-things-you-need-to-know-about-monitor-based-commissioning-a-siemens-white-paper-final.pdf

Most everyone knows about commissioning. For most systems the concept is straightforward, and the goal is universal - optimization - chiefly for reliability (be it economic or functional.. and this is not really an "or" at transcendence).

It is more nuanced what happens with re-commissioning a system... Is it a snapshot? Does one stop the process? etc.

Then after one gets the before/after understood... one is faced with understanding ongoing versus batch/jump. The real winners (sometimes better termed "non-losers") are the ones who can harness the power of continous improvement.

Here is Contiuous Improvement with a large "C". 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continual_improvement_process