This chapter is a collection of concepts that are used in Building X apps.

Company

A company is considered the top-level unit, for example Siemens, and consists of a number of subscriptions, which in turn are divided into partitions. A company can have multiple locations which can be modeled as campuses with multiple buildings or as standalone buildings. The membership of a user in one or more user groups of a company with access to one or more partitions is required to use the Building X apps.

Subscription

A Subscription is a contractual arrangement to use 1...n purchasable Building X apps. The subscription gives access to a set of apps that is tailored for a specific use case. All subscriptions give access to the three platform apps: Accounts, Devices and Data Setup.

Partitions

Partitions are logical groupings of data within a subscription of a company. Partitions allow for granular access rights on different clusters of data for the same user in the same company.

Example:

  • Company ABC consists of Subscription A and Subscription B.
  • Subscription A has been split into Partition A1 and Partition A2.
  • Subscription B has been split into Partition B1, Partition B2 and Partition B3.

A user U1 is given membership to user groups which have advanced (read + write) role access to Partition A1 and B1, and basic (read-only) role access to Partition A2 and B2. U1 is not given access to Partition B3.

As a result, the user U1 will be able to fully view and work with data from Partition A1 and B1, only be able to view data from Partition A2 and B2 and will not be able to access data from Partition B3.

Hand over a default partition

The default partition is the partition on which all rules and rule engine instance is running. If you hand over a default partition, you lose the rules but you still have access to the Rules app and you can create new rules.

Handing over a default partition causes you to lose the rules created in the default partition.

Roles

User roles are a predefined set of permissions for a specific app. In Building X, three types of roles exist: System roles, platform roles and app specific user roles. The system roles give access to the complex functions of Accounts, the two platform roles each give access to the functions of the platform apps Devices and Data Setup and are tailored to a specific use case, like Application Engineer. To give access to the functions of the other apps of a subscription, an app specific user role is required. Most apps have three levels of permissions: Basic, Standard and Advanced. User roles cannot be given directly to a user but are managed by creating user groups for each of the available user roles.

User groups

User groups grant access to a partition of a company and at the same time give the users in the user group a specific level of permissions. A user group can give access to multiple partitions but can only contain one user role. To give a user multiple user roles, the user must be added to the according user groups. For example, a user needs both the Application Engineer platform role and the Operations Manager – Advanced user role for a partition of the company. This user needs to be a member of two user groups that have these roles and give access to the same partition.

User

A user is a person that is a member of at least one company and has been granted access to at least one partition. A user needs an account to access any Building X app. Access can be given either by the Customer administrator of a company or by Siemens or a Third Party at Customer’s request and authorization.

Machine user

A machine user is a virtual user that can perform a specific set of actions in the background. For machine users, a set of machine user roles is available. To give a machine user access to a partition, the machine user needs to be a member of a user group with the required machine user role and access to the required partition.

Sites

A site is a representation of the company with a real address. A site can either be a single building or a campus with multiple buildings. A company and partition can have multiple sites. If a campus is added to a partition, all buildings within that campus are part of the chosen partition.

Siemens ID account

The Siemens ID user account is required to access Building X apps. A user can create a new Siemens ID account after being invited to a company. During the first logging in, the new user is required to create an account in the Siemens ID Self Service Portal. After registration, the user can access My account in the Accounts app to review the available memberships and set up the notification preferences.

Flow editor

The Flow editor is based on the Node-RED UI. For more information on basic concepts like nodes, flows and wires, see the Node-RED user guide: https://nodered.org/docs/user-guide/concepts

In the Flow editor, a set of specific nodes linked to the subscription is available, for example Building X custom nodes. For more information on nodes, see Building X Nodes.

Flow

A flow can be defined in the flow editor. For each flow, nodes can be selected and connected in the needed order. The flow defines what data is used and how it is processed. For each rule, only one flow can be created.

Rules

A rule is a defined business logic on how to collect and process Building X data to extract new information and additional insights that can then be used by other Building X services or applications. Rules are created for one or multiple equipment types. A rule processes data from various input sources and combines it to provide new information and insights to other applications.

In the Rules app, different levels of rules exist:

  • The Company library is a catalogue of generic rules that can be assigned to partitions and linked to assets.
  • The Partition library is a catalogue of all rules that are assigned to a specific partition. In the Partition library, rules can be linked to assets and can be scheduled for all the linked assets.
  • The Asset rules displays all the rule-asset pairs that have been created after linking partition rules to assets. Here, users can adjust the input parameters of the rules to match specific asset characteristics, manually trigger or schedule the run for the rule-asset pairs and view the rules' run results.

Depending on your subscription and user role, you can access the Company library and assign a rule to your own partitions or to partitions from other companies that are shared with you.