Integration of heterogeneous building automation systems using ontologies

The challenge of integrating heterogeneous systems in order to combine their functionality is of utmost importance for the further deployment of building automation systems. The goal is to allow comprehensive communication among the systems. This will provide enhanced possibilities thus making way for intelligent buildings. Traditionally, integration is achieved using gateways which require considerable configuration effort. To alleviate this overhead and provide a unified system view, a generic application model is proposed that can accommodate all functionality found in building automation systems. The employment of this model promises several benefits such as a central point for configuration and system access. The method of choice are ontologies, which allow to offer a seminal representation of knowledge, an abstraction of the heterogeneous network infrastructure and automatic reasoning on the stored knowledge.