Hendro Wicaksono

Knowledge-based intelligent energy management using building automation system

The rise of energy needs and energy prices due to shortage of energy resources force companies and households to consume energy more efficiently. In recent years building automation systems are commonly used to allow better comfort for the occupants, and also to improve security in the building. This paper describes an approach for improving energy efficiency in private and business buildings by utilizing building automation systems. The goal of the approach is to provide an intelligent system that can help the occupants to monitor and control their energy consumption and also to notice their energy saving potentials. This paper also introduces method of knowledge-driven energy analysis that offers more intelligent mechanism as improvement of classical data-driven analysis, which is commonly used by existing energy analysis solutions.

Ontology-driven Requirements Elicitation in Product Configuration Systems

Producing timely and customer-oriented products is a key factor for manufacturers‘ success in competing in the recent global economic era. Customer needs are becoming more complex as a result of rapid changes in social, technical, and economic conditions. Manufacturers must provide more flexibility and individual customizations of the products. This is not an easy task due to the different perspectives between manufacturer and customer during the pre-contract phase. Product configuration systems are generally used to improve the quotation process. However, it is still difficult to provide customer satisfying products because customers often cannot clearly articulate their requirements. This paper introduces an approach that assists the customer in articulating their requirements and supports the manufacturer to capture the customer needs completely. We propose an intelligent product configuration system that harmonizes both customer and manufacturer perspectives, based on an ontology-based integrated knowledge model. We utilize ontology-based methods and techniques to develop a recommender system in the product configuration system to improve the requirements elicitation and to avoid requirement inconsistencies.

An Intelligent System for Improving Energy Efficiency in Building Using Ontology and Building Automation Systems

Energy efficiency is a keyword that can be found nowadays in all domains in which energy demand exists. The steadily rising energy demand, the consequent energy scarcity and rising prices of energy resources are forcing companies and people to redefine their activities in a more energy efficient way. Besides industry and transportation, the building sector is the most important energy consumer, as a study for European countries showed that up to 40% of the total energy consumption in the EU can be ascribed to this segment. The residential use represents around 3% of the total energy consumption in the building sector (Balaras et al., 2007).

Methodology to Develop Ontological Building Information Model for Energy Management System in Building Operational Phase

Energy consumption in building sector has been taking a significant percentage of the total energy consumption on earth. This is due to the development of more advanced and sophisticated building appliances to fulfil the comfort requirements. The EU has responded this trend by requiring zero CO2 emission in building by 2020 and by supporting innovative research approaches for improving energy efficiency in buildings with still considering inhabitants comfort. This chapter describes an approach to develop an intelligent system for building specific energy management that allows occupants and facility managers to monitor and control the energy consumption and also detects the energy wasting points. In this chapter, we explain the methodology to develop ontology based information model for building energy management offering expressive representation and reasoning capabilities. We also highlight an approach to develop the ontology as the knowledge base providing the intelligence of the system. Furthermore we show the improvement of the energy performance analysis with the help of ontology based approach.

ENERGY EFFICIENCY EVALUATION IN MANUFACTURING THROUGH AN ONTOLOGY-REPRESENTED KNOWLEDGE BASE

Improving energy efficiency in a manufacturing company through an energy management system requires active participation of different stakeholders and involvement of different organizational entities and technical processes. Interoperability of stakeholders and entities is the key factor to achieve a successful implementation of an energy management system. Researchers have been developing approaches in applying ontologies to address interoperability issues among humans as well as machines. Ontologies have also been used for knowledge representation in different domains, such as energy management and manufacturing. In recent years, researchers have developed knowledge-based intelligent energy management systems in buildings, especially households, which use ontologies for knowledge representation. In the manufacturing domain, ontologies have been used for knowledge management in order to provide a common formal understanding between the stakeholders, who have different background knowledge. This paper proposes an approach to apply ontology to allow knowledge-based energy efficiency evaluation in manufacturing companies. The ontology provides a formal knowledge representation that addresses the interoperability issues due to different human stakeholders as well as machines involved in the energy management system of the company. This paper also describes the methods used to construct and to process the ontology. Copyright

Efficient Energy Performance Indicators for Different Level of Production Organizations in Manufacturing Companies

Demands for lower CO2 emissions due to the climate change and the rising of energy prices force manufacturing companies to deal with the energy issue. Energy management, where one of the tasks is energy efficiency evaluation, can help the companies to overcome the issue. This paper presents holistic metric to evaluate the energy efficiency in manufacturing companies, which considers the different organization level of production, such as machine or equipment level, production line level, and factory level. As the size of the scope and the number of observed factors vary, the metric provide flexible criteria to select relevant variables. The developed metric could be used to simulate and to compare energy efficiency of different production facilities, lines, and factories in a single company. The metric is an instrument to recognize how energy (in) efficient is a production system, so that adjustments may be made in the planning and management to achieve the energy savings.

Methodology for Flexibility Measurement in Semi-automatic Production

Demands on production systems are changing constantly as a result of changing competitive conditions and are also closely linked to the performance goals of time, quality, costs and innovation ability. This results in an ever increasing selection between various competitors, with the most important selection criteria being customer individualization, an increasingly shorter product life cycle and new technological innovations. This situation creates an existential need for production companies to manage to adapt over time to the changed surrounding conditions and plan their resources in a way that makes them suitable for cost-effective and market-oriented manufacturing. The following article presents the computerized methodology of an innovative evaluation technique called ecoFLEX which allows the measurement of a production system’s flexibility. At first the paper details the general concept for estimating production flexibility and the approach to concretely calculating the flexibility on different production levels. Furthermore, it presents the practical experience gained in ecoFLEX during its application at a small and medium enterprise (SME) to evaluate the complex manufacturing coherencies from the perspective of their efficiency. Especially it will be shown how the usage of flexibility indices calculated by ecoFLEX helps to come to the right decision on the strategic and operational level in production systems.

Handling resource efficiency in production of small and medium sized enterprises

For years, production companies have faced an increasingly complex and rapidly changing market, which results in higher client customization. These coupled with a high complexity of cause-effect relationships of industries, globally-dispersed markets, technologies and economic areas create great challenges to the manufacturing systems. Uncertain projections about future sales, fluctuations in quantities, new manufacturing technologies and shorter product life cycles with changing product requirements, at the same time with an increasing range of variants requires a continuous transformation of production structures to the current requirements on the market. As a consequence, methods for evaluating a companys production flexibility are of great significance. The following article discusses the experience gained in research results in medium-sized production. The use of the IT-framework “WertProNET” that emerged from these results shows the impact that production changes have on economical plant operation, and how unnecessary additional costs from the inefficient use of resources can be avoided.

A Product Life-Cycle Oriented Approach for Knowledge-Based Product Configuration Systems

Faced with increasing complexity in the global economy, a timely and accurate operation of the market demands an accelerated harmonization of customer and manufacturer perspective in the quotation phase through product configuration systems. An approach for knowledge-based product configuration through the integration of experience and knowledge from the product use phase is presented below. The goal of this approach is to enable a faster and software-controlled harmonization of the different customer’s and the manufacturer’s points of view during the pre-contract phase. Therefore a case-based reasoning method was developed to be integrated in a rule-based product configuration system. It allows a faster ascertainment of customer needs and thereby provides accurate and complete configuration of the provided products.

Resource-Efficient Production Planning through Flexibility Measurements in Value Creation Systems

For years, manufacturing companies have faced an increasingly complex and rapidly changing market environment which is the result of, if nothing else, higher customer individualization. This particularly concerns SME’s, whose competitiveness is increasingly dependent on the early identification of new customer and market requirements and their ability to dynamically respond to these in an adequate fashion. In order to meet the high standards demanded of the planning quality and planning safety with ever increasing complexity and the continuous reduction of the planning time available, SME-compatible IT technologies are needed for the simulation of complex manufacturing relations. The following article addresses this problem and in-troduces the method set ecoFLEX, which enables the simulation of targeted and dynamic alignment of existing plant structures, resources and value-added processes with new production requirements. Unlike digital factory planning tools, a complete picture of the specific plant situation is not required, as will be illustrated by selected case studies from the medium sized production sector.