Integrating Semantic Web Ontologies Towards Achieving Automated Engineering of Controls in Smart Buildings

The operation of large electro-mechanical systems in a building needs to be automated to manage physical processes in a controlled and coordinated manner. Currently, automation systems need to be manually engineered during their commissioning and when changes to requirements and design occur during their operation. In this article, we show that the main challenge in achieving automated engineering is that a unified system knowledge consisting of interlinked machine-understandable descriptions of requirements, system design, and the principles of the underlying physical processes is missing. We have investigated the conceptual bridging required to bring together this hitherto fragmented knowledge and have created a high-level ontology that helps achieve our desired unified view of the system. We evaluated our approach in a real-life building automation system. We show that it enables the automated selection of a reusable control program that matches the system requirements.