Event Response System
Why it’s so important
You may be wondering what an event response system is. Wikipedia defines it as a software architecture pattern promoting the production, detection, consumption of, and reaction to events. So, why is it so important?
An enterprise class solution has to be flexible. It’s not something that can be out of date when something “new” comes out. The reality is, we can’t predict the future. We can guarantee that technology is changing at a pace that by the time you get it implemented, there’s a new consideration. Instead of trying to predict the future, we decided to build a platform that was not only ready for it, but embraced it. An event based system is exactly how we did that. Any event can trigger any response. The events or responses don’t even need to be invented yet.
An event is quite simply a change in state. This can be a door opening changing the state of a door sensor or the weather reaching a certain temperature. It can be a time of day, a duration of time, virtually anything.
A response is the action you want to take when an event is triggered. For example, when the door opens a response could be to turn a specific set of lights on or send a message.
By building this type of system, it’s less about what the current events or responses are and more about the application of this type of system in a specific environment. While we are focused on the hospitality market currently, our technology is not specific to it. It’s how we are applying it. How we would apply it to education, commercial, healthcare, etc. would be based on the exact same system. The only difference would be different types of events would trigger different types of responses.
We have focused on building a system that can solve today’s needs and be an asset as business needs change. That “system” is our ROC (Room Operations Center) platform. Everything Evolve builds is based on this platform and its event driven architecture.
Let’s dive into a general system overview in regards to our energy management solutions. A fully integrated Evolve system can be made to control lighting, HVAC, TV power, shade and draperies, and even doorbell systems in any room. Let’s stick with occupancy detection devices to keep things simple.
Upon entering a previously unoccupied guest room, the room’s “Welcome” scene is engaged once the door opens and motion is detected. This results in the thermostat automatically defaulting to a pre-determined comfort set point as dictated by the property, e.g. 72. Upon exiting, the room’s “Economy” mode is engaged after the guest closes the door behind them and a timeout period is reached — let’s say 30 minutes. The thermostat automatically reverts to a property specific setback temperature to help you avoid costly energy overages, e.g. 67 or 77.
The devices that make this possible include a thermostat, door sensor, and motion sensor. The event that took place is the opening or closing of the door and the response is the automatic temperature adjustments. These devices help sense whether or not rooms are occupied and the event response system adjusts your energy consumption accordingly.
As you can imagine, there are many scenarios in a smart guest room that can trigger events. Some such events don’t necessarily impact the guest experience in the way that HVAC comfort and energy saving modes do, but analyzing them can help hoteliers operate their properties more efficiently, both from a staff perspective and an energy perspective. These events are processed and exposed to our customers via our back-office website.
Our ROC module (or ROCm for short) sends many such events. For example, our occupancy system (which manages comfort and energy savings modes for the thermostat) needs to know when a guest is physically in his or her room in order to perform its job properly. In addition to triggering HVAC changes directly, the ROC module also sends an event to our cloud service that indicates that the occupancy state of the room has changed. Our cloud platform then analyzes that data and produces a report for hotel staff that lays out the physical occupancy profile of a property, among other things. Armed with such a report, the hotel staff can make data-driven decisions about the most effective time to send the housekeeping or engineering, rather than relying on anecdotal evidence about occupancy in their hotel.
Our ROC module produces a wealth of events, from occupancy-related events, to system health-related events, and many more. The result is a system that provides complete visibility, simplified.
