RE: [obix-req] We need your use cases!

["Peter Manolescue" <manolescue@pandora.be>]

Monitoring and Data Gathering

.	A facility manager has had complaints about the afternoon air
temperature in the research lab.  He sets up a schedule to monitor and
record the temperature to an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis.

.	As part of cut backs, the company needs to reduce its office
space.  There is a proposal to implement 'hot-desking' to share
facilities between workers who spend a lot of time out of the company.
Rather than ask each employee to estimate how much time he/she spends in
the company (and risk inaccurate replies) a study is performed over two
months to record, from the access control system, actual presence of
each individual in the facility.  This is combined with time information
from the motion sensors to estimate real space usage within departments.
Information is used to optimize the space and operations of the company.

.	The president needs to call a quick but important meeting with
his senior staff.  As part of corporate economies, personal secretaries
were replaced by staff services six months previously.  So he has no
idea if the people he needs are in the facility which is very large.
There is no point to the meeting if anyone is absent.  He could
interrogate the access control system but it only has readers for
entrance not exit so team members could have left without notification.
Recently, however, the car park system's CCTV was fitted with number
plate recognition with a facility to read on entrance and exit.  From
this he discovers that all the managers are in (or at least their cars
are).  He sends a group SMS to call a meeting in 30 minutes.


Event handling and integration

.	The works council has been looking at ways to improve motivation
among people working on the line.  Investigations have shown that people
crave feedback about how they are doing as a team. Someone comes up with
an idea to experiment with.  As each item comes off the production line,
it is automatically counted.  This information is sent to the PA system
and every time one hundred products are completed, an automating message
is broadcast over the PA with a measure of how much more or less has
been produced at that time compared with the previous shift.  Since the
facility runs an aggressive and rewarding production bonus scheme, this
is valuable information for the teams.

.	Equipment has been disappearing from the medical emergency room.
The facility manager is locking the door outside of normal working time
but suspects that someone has a copy of the master key and is taking
items after hours.  She sets up a trigger to send an SMS message to her
cell phone every time the door is opened outside normal hours.

.	A new emergency lighting and PA system is being installed in a
hospital.  The building has many emergency exits.  Occupants need to be
directed away from any fire and towards the nearest safe exit but this
will vary according the fire location.  A logic pattern is set up to
define the lighting pattern and fast exit messages as a function of
which fire sensors have been activated.


Control

.	On a university campus, late night basketball matches are
sometimes scheduled at short notice.  The facility manager needs to
'wake up' the sports hall to get it ready.  At present he needs to set
all the different systems manually: HVAC, lighting, PA, security etc.
What he would prefer is simply to use his PC to select the basketball
match 'scene' from a list of pre-defined configurations with a schedule
that gives a start time of 9pm and automatic shut down at midnight.  The
HVAC system will measure the outside air temperature and calculate when
the heating has to come on to achieve 20 degrees Centigrade by 9pm.

.	The local power utility cannot build any more generating
capacity.  To prevent outages, it is motivating companies to restrict
consumption.  An engineering company is interested in a new contract
which gives lower prices if they can guarantee that certain levels of
power consumption will never be exceeded.  However the energy
consumption profile of the site varies considerably; one week welding is
crucial, the next chemical treatment is essential.  The company needs
different energy