Rule-Based Model for Smart Building Supervision and Management

Smart buildings are aimed at monitoring and controlling building facilities through a Building Management System (BMS). While current BMSs are based on processing logs of devices deployed in the building, this paper enables supervision and control of building by the use of semantic technologies. A common information base, as a core data model, is defined, which describes and defines formally the main physical and conceptual building elements (namely: assets, spaces, data points, incidents and key performance indicators), their characteristics and interrelationships, as well as the constraints that apply to them. For instantiation purposes, we relied on a logical framework based on the existential rules, which allows to describe any domain as a set of facts, a set of rules and a set of constraints. We have implemented a fragment of our logical model as a proof of concept, where two real-world scenarios are implemented as demonstrators of the FUSE-IT project. The former is about access control to a data center, and the latter is about temperature anomaly correlated with the heater functioning in a given zone of a building. The aim of these experiments is to illustrate the functional capabilities of our approach for smart control in building management.