To access information specific to individual rooms or HVAC zones the building manager would click on floor plans of the building, as shown in the images above. By selecting the type of data to view and clicking a room, he could call up the desired information, such as the lighting fixture data, shown on the left below, or room schedules, shown on the right below.
The HyperCard stacks also had mechanisms for entering, viewing, and compiling weather and utility consumption information. Predictions were computed for current usage, based on date, day of the week, point in the semester, and current weather conditions, using a set of formulas James Jones developed, based on past usage. The scripts could then construct graphs to display the data and predictions. A graph of predicted and actual gas and electric usage is shown below on the left. A graph of predicted hourly boiler and chiller demand is shown below on the right.
I was asked to write most of the required HyperTalk scripts shortly after the project was started. The initial idea for the project, as well as the statistical analysis of the utility consumption and resulting predictive formulas, came from James Jones. Craig Zehnder, an undergraduate student, wrote some of the preliminary scripts and entered most of the data. Kurt Brandle, head of the Energy Cost Avoidance Project, oversaw the project.
This building manager's tool was presented in the conference proceedings for the 1993 International Solar Energy Society Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. Favorable response to this tool by U of M building managers led to the development of a similar tool for the manager of the U of M Dental Building.