DCRDL: An energy management rule definition language for context-based device control in smart buildings

Improving energy efficiency of smart buildings becomes more complex in the era of Internet of Things (IoT) where networked devices supply unprecedented high-resolution energy related information. As data acquisition and device control services are integrated into the building management platform by using web-based RESTful APIs, fine-grained context-based automatic control ability based on sensed and metered situations using a programmable approach is enabled. Rule-based approaches have been applied to design controllers for an individual device or a sub-system in buildings. However, the rules are static and usually mixed with the application logics. To improve energy efficiency by allowing smart devices to work in a collaborative way, a flexible programming architecture, which involves all the energy related factors, is required for complex context-based control of devices. In this paper, we propose DCRDL, a rule definition language that enables energy control policy designers to write flexible rules to control the behaviors of devices based on various levels of energy related information. We conducted several experiments with policies written in DCRDL in a real smart building, and the result shows that DCRDL is an efficient tool for situation-based device control for energy efficiency in IoT-enabled smart buildings.