Integration of heterogeneous building automation systems using ontologies

Abstract

Abstract-The challenge of integrating heterogeneous systems in order to combine their functionality is of utmost importance for the further deployment of building automation systems. The goal is to allow comprehensive communication among the systems. This will provide enhanced possibilities thus making way for intelligent buildings. Traditionally, integration is achieved using gateways which require considerable configuration effort. To alleviate this overhead and provide a unified system view, a generic application model is proposed that can accommodate all functionality found in building automation systems. The employment of this model promises several benefits such as a central point for configuration and system access. The method of choice are ontologies, which allow to offer a seminal representation of knowledge, an abstraction of the heterogeneous network infrastructure and automatic reasoning on the stored knowledge.

Design and verification of simulation models of passive houses

“…These four layers are (1) the device layer, (2) the connectivity layer, (3) the service layer, and (4) the semantic agents. The paper [13] deals with the integration of heterogeneous building automation systems (BAS). Capturing knowledge in the BAS ontology, four protocols (BACnet, KNX, LonWorks, and ZigBee) are supported, a system is configured centrally, and an access point for other systems is done.…”

Semantic-Based Enhancement of ISO/IEC 14543-3 EIB/KNX Standard for Building Automation

“…DomoML [18] was the first specific proposal of a building automation ontology suite. Reinisch et al [19] acknowledged the relevance of semantic-enhanced approaches upon current HBA standards, for cost and efficiency motivations; they introduced a theoretical ontology-based framework for the integration of different HBA protocols at application level. In [20], Bonino et al presented the first self-contained prototype which includes a reasoning module able to manage and coordinate heterogeneous devices by means of logic rules processing.…”

Enhanced control application development in Building Automation

“…This model encapsulates the system software entities in a way which is inspired by the object-oriented paradigm. It also makes use of a generic ontology, which describes the application behavior and provides relevant configuration parameters [8]. The following list describes the intended advantages the proposed framework provides:…”

“…Configuration is based on an ontology (cf. Listing 1, [8], [11]), that hosts the technology specific application models (i.e., BACnet objects, KNX standardized functional blocks, LonWorks SFPTs, ZigBee objects) as well as a definition of generic application objects. Besides, 1 Sandboxes might even be designed to be capable of executing native BAS code and to allow the integration of already existing applications.…”