Towards a Uniform Exchange Format for Home and Building Automation using VDI 3814

Abstract

Exchanging technical documents in the building automation domain is a complicated process. Files are distributed either as drawings, spreadsheets, or text documents. Each stakeholder has to re-enter the data into their own system, and changes are revised manually, often even without revision control. This paper presents a uniform exchange format based on the 'graphical' standard VDI 3814. To increase acceptance, the industry standards XSD and XML were chosen. As a result of this work, a model is provided that covers the concepts and exchange files provided in the VDI 3814 standard. Given a supporting tool, data can be entered, revised, and exchanged automatically. Based on this unified representation, it is subsequently possible to transfer the data into one of the already existing ontologies in this domain by using model transformations. Some of these ontologies are also referred to in this paper.