A context-awareness architecture for managing thermal energy in an nZEB building

Global warming is seriously affecting society, but also to a lesser extent the longevity of the population and migration of people from the countryside to the cities present challenges for governments. Smart applications (smart city, smart grid, smart buildings, smart water, smart health) offer an alternative to deal with these challenges. Pervasive sensors, with increasingly powerful features, allow innovative developments, making possible a progressive growth in the so-called smart applications. Because information is the backbone of any type of smart environment, this work presents an architecture approach to take advantage of the capabilities of advanced sensors. Specifically in this work this architecture is applied to renewable energy systems for a better management of the thermal energy. A semantic sensors network has been developed to provide context awareness for managing thermal flow in a near Zero Energy Building (nZEB). The key elements are an Ontology Web Language (OWL) to describe the sensors and contextual knowledge, and a Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) to represent rule-based inferences for context reasoning. The main goal is to improve thermal energy comfort in a building with a reduction in the energy used.