Experimenting automatic generation of energy renovation scenarios with ontology reasoning

Semantic web technology has been progressively adopted in the AEC domain for its flexibility and extensibility in describing data schema, in particular the different IFC versions, coupled with the expressiveness of a generic querying language (SPARQL) to extract information from BIM models. Dynamic knowledge enrichment of model through reasoning is a third paradigm of semantic web on which more and more research has been completed in recent years to apply it to AEC practices, often through a reduced set of inference rules. In this paper, we present an experiment on using semantic web technologies, and in particular reasoning rules, to deploy an automatic generation of energy renovation scenarios to compare traditional renovation of envelopes and renewable installation with an integrated solution developed in the ENSNARE H2020 project, at a feasibility study stage. The semantic data model and the inference rules are presented and the overall strategy is discussed.