Software Support for Building Automation Requirements Engineering—An Application of Semantic Web Technologies in Automation

Modern building automation systems consist of up to several thousands of components (e.g., sensors, controllers, actuators) with numerous attributes and dependencies. Additionally, different crafts of the building automation domain, e.g., heating, ventilation, lighting, access control, are involved in the design and implementation of such a building automation system. In addition, various engineering standards have to be considered within the requirements engineering phase. Although the modeling of the requirements for decentralized building automation systems requires a huge effort, there is little software support available for this task today. This offers optimization potential not only for the requirements engineering, but also for subsequent phases of the engineering process in building automation. Within this paper, the authors describe a knowledge-based requirements engineering approach and a supporting software, which is based on Semantic Web technology.