Semantic Description of Equipment and its Controls in Building Automation Systems
Type
forthcoming
Author(s)
Ramanathan, Ganesh
Husmann, Maria
Abstract (De)
Building automation (BA) systems orchestrate and monitor the functioning of a wide variety of utilities in a building so that living spaces are kept comfortable, safe, and secure. The complexity of such a system which involves multiple disciplines (heating, air-conditioning, lighting, fire safety, security etc.), coming from multiple vendors, is compounded by the fact that each building differs in the way the equipment operate and coordinate. So far, efforts involving semantic modeling of BA systems, like Haystack [3], IFC [2], or Brick [1], have been focusing on the description of the building topology, installed equipment, and to a lesser extent, the control strategy, the modeling of the physical process and the role of the control program. In addition, the semantics of interaction with the devices used in BA, which is essential to establish technical interoperability, has so far not been coupled to the BA semantic models. As a result, planners, project engineers, technical operators, and service technicians have to design and understand the working of the system by piecing together information from different sources. From our experience at the Smart Infrastructure division of Siemens AG, we describe briefly in the following sections some key use-cases, the challenges faced by us while applying semantic data in BA, and finally describe our approach and its evaluation in real-life buildings.