Methodology for Assuring Interoperability in Demand-Response Services

Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) have become very popular in the last decade. Many vendors and integrators are providing their own solutions to be deployed in buildings, which sometimes co-exist in the same building. The variety of protocols and communication mechanisms included in these solutions should be considered. Hence, interoperability plays a crucial role in ensuring that these systems can provide a holistic energy management strategy and integrate monitoring and control elements. This work presents a framework to allow the information exchange between sensors, controllers and software services aiming to ensure interoperability in demand response strategies. Under this approach, an interoperable architecture is defined where the core element is the data model to represent information. In this sense, domOS Common Ontology is selected as the kernel and some extensions have been done in order to better include the representation of building assets, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and user profiles and preferences. Besides, other extensions have been used to represent other devices and units of measurement.