A Rule-Based Ontology Reasoning System for Context-Aware Building Energy Management

Global energy demand grows rapidly. The building sector accounts for about 20% of world's energy consumption. Intelligent and systematic energy management technologies have been increasingly exploited to reduce the energy use in the building sector. Previous studies used their own decision model including knowledge-bases and rules. However, they are lack of a structural framework for organizing information and a form of knowledge representation as a set of concepts in the building energy domain. To enhance a framework and knowledge representation, we adopt ontology. Furthermore, ontology can provide reasoning functionality and context-awareness. We propose a rule-based ontology reasoning system that provides context-awareness. In the proposed system, we design an ontology model for building energy management and make reasoning rules from the knowledge-bases of accumulated building energy saving measures. The proposed system detects energy waste context and provides energy saving measures to eliminate the energy waste context. We implemented the proposed system on a real office building. The implemented ontology reasoning system diagnoses the context of the target building and presents the energy saving measures simultaneously. By use of building energy simulation, the amount of energy saving is estimated when the energy saving measures are applied. The simulation result shows the positive effect of our proposed rule-based ontology reasoning system.