The presented work discusses the potential application of ontologies for design automation in the building automation field. It relates to an ongoing implementation and related prototype being developed by an automation systems provider. Modern buildings have complex technical equipment which is hard to operate efficiently from a user's point of view. Optimal commissioning and operation of building energy systems necessitate complex design and configuration of building automation and control

more »

... tems (BACS). Generally, a BACS supplier or installer uses its own software system and customized monitoring databases. The presented approach tries to automate BACS setup relying on semantic modeling and knowledge reuse. It shall support the design and configuration of complex BACS systems by the means of automated characterization of the underlying building energy system and inferring of its most adapted control systems and strategies. For that purpose, it makes use of ontologies for modeling the topology of energy systems as well as emulating the knowledge of BACS design experts. Indeed, automation providers have much expert knowledge and experience in the design, evaluation and commissioning of energy system controls. It is investigated whether this manufacturer expertise can be represented via knowledge representation and model parameterization. A workflow is proposed that shall make it possible to support automated BACS design relying on a formalized description of HVAC systems from a wide variety of application fields using a generic templates library. For this purpose, existing energy systems are examined with regard to various structural properties such as topology, energy flows and control loop structures as well as needed sensors and monitoring functions. It is taken into account that the energy supply of buildings is planned individually to a high level of detail due to different system requirements. Therefore, an automated design of control systems requires the limitation and classification of possible system c [...]