Henrik Dibowski

Automated Design of Building Automation Systems

The design of large building automation systems (BASs) with thousands of devices is a laborious task with a lot of recurrent works for identical automated rooms. The usage of prefabricated off-the-shelf devices and design patterns simplifies this task nowadays but creates new interoperability problems. As a result, the selection of devices is essential for a good system design but is often limited by a lack of information. This paper introduces a novel automatic design approach for large BASs that covers the device selection, interoperability evaluation, and composition of BASs. It follows a continuous top-down design with different levels of abstraction starting at requirement engineering and ending at a fully developed and industry-spanning BAS design.

Ontology-based device descriptions and device repository for building automation devices

Device descriptions play an important role in the design and commissioning of modern building automation systems and help reducing the design time and costs. However, all established device descriptions are specialized for certain purposes and suffer from several weaknesses. This hinders a further design automation, which is strongly needed for the more and more complex building automation systems. To overcome these problems, this paper presents novel Ontology-based Device Descriptions (ODDs) along with a layered ontology architecture, a specific ontology view approach with virtual properties, a generic access interface, a triple store-based database backend, and a generic search mask GUI with underlying query generation algorithm. It enables a formal, unified, and extensible specification of building automation devices, ensures their comparability, and facilitates a computer-enabled retrieval, selection, and interoperability evaluation, which is essential for an automated design. The scalability of the approach to several ten thousand devices is demonstrated.

BASont - A modular, adaptive building automation system ontology

Several ontologies exist that model aspects of home or building automation systems for specific use cases. However, no comprehensive approach exists, that models building automation systems in a modular way to be usable in various use cases and tools. The paper proposes the BASont that addresses various use cases over the life cycle of a building automation system from design, to commissioning, to operation, and refurbishment. The use of the BASont is demonstrated for a data retrieval and self-commissioning use case.

Integrated automated design approach for building automation systems

The planning and design of building automation systems is a time consuming, error prone and nowadays more and more expensive task, consisting of a lot of repeated manual design steps done by specialized engineers. To reduce the engineering costs for such systems, the authors present a new automated top-down design approach within this paper. A knowledge-based system supports the planner at the requirement analysis by means of a guided dialog. Subsequently, the complete automation system is automatically designed in two steps. The abstract design proceeds a design based on platform- and manufacturer-independent function blocks via generative programming. The detailed design replaces the function blocks by platform- and manufacturer-specific profiles by means of evolutionary techniques.

Ontology-based Device Descriptions and triple store based device repository for automation devices

Device descriptions play an important role in the design and commissioning of modern automation systems and help reducing the design time and costs. However, all established device descriptions are specialized for certain purposes and suffer from several weaknesses. This hinders a further design automation, which is strongly needed for the more and more complex automation systems. To overcome these problems, this paper presents novel Ontology-based Device Descriptions (ODDs) along with a layered ontology architecture and triple store based database backend. It enables a formal, unified and extensible specification of devices, ensures their comparability and facilitates a computer enabled retrieval, selection and interoperability evaluation. The scalability of the approach to several ten thousand devices is demonstrated.

Generation of function block based designs using Semantic Web technologies

Embedded systems are used in many domains today. However, the design process of these systems is complex and time-consuming. In automation domains the complexity can be decreased by using function block based designs to specify the functionality of the system to be created. But this has to be done still manually. This paper introduces an approach to generate such function block based designs automatically from requirements. Therefore a generative approach is used, where design patterns were assembled to complete designs. The pattern description and the generation process are realized by Semantic Web technologies. The evaluation of the approach is exemplified by functional schematics of room automation designs.

Automated design of room automation systems by using an evolutionary optimization method

The design of room automation systems is a challenging task with growing complexity and a high optimization potential. On the market, a high number of prefabricated devices from different manufacturers is available for a large variety of functions. This leads to a high number of device combinations and many design variants respectively, that should optimally realize the requirements. To overcome this problem, an efficient and scalable solution method is needed, that can create multi-vendor designs with high quality. In this paper, a method that deals successfully with this objective is presented including test results. With the abstract design of the system and additional requirements given, it can synthesize optimal multi-vendor system designs by using an efficient evolutionary algorithm with directed operations.

A semantic Requirement Ontology for the engineering of building automation systems by means of OWL

The increasing complexity of modern building automation systems (BAS) results in higher initial investment costs for BAS compared to the costs for conventional building installation. This fact scares many potential customers off the application of BAS, although these systems offer significant energy cost saving potential. To reduce investment costs for BAS, automated design processes offer significant optimization potential. For such an automated design process, consistent requirements for the individual BAS are mandatory. Within this paper, the authors propose a solution for a Requirement Ontology which is based on the knowledge representation language OWL (Web Ontology Language) for the automated design process of BAS.

Semantic device descriptions based on standard Semantic Web technologies

Established device descriptions for automation devices lack a machine understandable semantics, thus inhibiting desired tasks like a semantic retrieval of devices, their automatic parameterization and interoperability analysis or the automated design of automation systems. To overcome these limitations, an approach for a semantic specification of automation devices is presented, which covers the hardware and particularly the applications of the devices. The semantic device descriptions are based on semantic Web technologies, especially OWL. Several application scenarios are shown, which demonstrate the potential of the introduced approach. Examples reach from a variable distribution of information over a semantic retrieval of devices up to performing intelligent reasoning based on logical inference.

Holistic design of wireless building automation systems

Wireless building automation systems are gaining momentum as they promise an easy installation in old and new buildings. But, the design of wireless building automation systems is still an extensive manual process with little to no tool support. In result, the system commissioning ends in trial-and-error set-ups to identify interoperable devices, to solve issues with wireless signal propagation and to understand energy problems of nodes. This paper introduces a holistic design approach that addresses these common issues in wireless building automation system design. It takes up novel design concepts and tools from wired system design and combines them in a holistic tool environment that supports the engineer in his common work flow to efficiently design reliable wireless building automation systems.