Semantic evolution in automation systems integration

Abstract

Modern buildings are conditioned by a variety of building services. These mainly involve lighting and shading as well as Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC). To assure an efficient operation of the services, the field of Building Automation Systems (BASs) has established. These systems are nowadays characterised as a highly heterogeneous landscape of different standards and technologies. Each of these technologies in use has its dedicated fields of applications in controlling building services. The resulting heterogeneity leads to considerable interoperability issues between building automation technologies. To address these issues, several approaches of integration have been developed in the past. The most promising way which has emerged was to provide a unified abstraction layer on top of these mutually incompatible systems. This thesis captures the current situation and presents an integration method for BASs but also including information about the building itself. Therefore, an architecture of two levels of comprehensiveness is chosen. To find the proper means to express the desired abstractions, state-of-the-art knowledge representation languages are examined with respect to their suitability towards creating unified views on the mentioned heterogeneous information sources. Information models are created for selected representatives of building automation technologies by using OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA). Additionally, an interface to integrate technologies from industry automation is defined at this point. This constitutes the first level of integration. The OPC UA-based, technology-specific views are in the following raised to a bigger context including aspects of Building Information Modelling (BIM). The resulting, holistic view is established by a Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontology which does not only regard static knowledge about buildings and their embedded automation systems but also allows access to runtime values of datapoints