Publications and deliverables
Deliverable 5.1
Title: | Configuration and decision support report |
Due date: | 2018-06-30 |
Executive summary:
This document describes the transformation of a set of configuration changes which was selected in the recommendation process specified in work package 4 into BAS configurations and human-readable reports.
Formalized selected recommendations from the last work package form the basis for the generation of configuration and decision support reports. During definition of the formalization process, it was already taken into account that suggested actions must be interpreted to set new values in the BAS and that a common configuration model is required. This means that in a first step, such a configuration model was specified as part of a task which overlapped with work package 4. The model is represented as an OWL graph which is contained in the ontology that is used in all phases of the developed system. It contains the properties respectively set points which must be changed, their location in the building, new values, effects on the building, as well as additional information like date and time of the detection of optimization potential.
Multiple state-of-the-art building automation technologies like KNX, BACnet, and LON were investigated in order to define a mapping between the common model and these popular standards. Particular attention was paid to configuration and commissioning procedures. It turned out that the specification of a fixed and exhaustive mapping is not feasible, because of several reasons which are associated with the way of how device configuration parameters are standardized respectively not standardized for these technologies. Hence, it was decided to use a state-of-the-art integration technology, namely OPC UA, to enable the automatic adoption of BAS configurations. An XSD schema was specified for the definition of mappings between control services in the ontology and OPC UA node ids which address the corresponding parameters and set points in the BAS.
An OPC UA client was developed based on the mentioned conclusions. It uses the common configuration model and the defined mapping as input and writes new values to an OPC UA server which is responsible for the propagation of the values into the actual automation system. For purposes of testing and development, OPC UA servers were implemented and populated with data variables. Such servers are also available for most of the modern BASs.
Besides the automatic transfer of configuration changes into the BAS, human-readable reports are generated for the facility management. Two kinds of reports are defined and designed. Fault reports inform FMs about problems which were detected in the building during the fault detection process defined in work package 2. Optimization reports, on the other hand, describe recognized optimization potential, configuration changes to use these potentials, and expected effects on comfort respectively energy consumption in the building. The generation of these reports relies on XML related technologies like DOM, XSLT, and XSL-FO. The outputs of the process are PDF files which can be distributed to the facility management.