Intelligent context-awareness system for energy efficiency in smart building based on ontology

• Published in: Sustainable computing informatics and systems Vol. 21; pp. 212 - 233
• Main Authors: Degha, Houssem Eddine, Laallam, Fatima Zohra, Said, Bachir
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.03.2019
• Subjects: Building energy management system; Context-awareness; Energy efficiency; Ontology; Smart building; Building energy management system; Energy efficiency; Context-awareness; Smart building; Ontology
• ISSN: 2210-5379
• DOI: 10.1016/j.suscom.2019.01.013

Context-awareness is an important research area. Many energy efficiency applications of ubiquitous computing need to access some related contexts to provide the best and adequate energy saving services at the right time and at the right place. One of the big challenges is the difficulty and the complexity to make systems identify and understand situations in the building business, especially in complex situations to provide adequate energy-saving services for each of which. This issue is divided into two parts: On one hand, the smart building and its environment must be modeled in a way that provides context-awareness. On the other hand is the how to effectively exploit this context-awareness to reduce energy consumption and increase the user comfort. In this paper, we propose an intelligent context-awareness Building Energy Management System (ICA-BEMS). ICA-BEMS uses hybrid energy-saving techniques based on a Smart Context-Awareness Management (Smart-CAM). Smart-CAM uses smart building ontology to organize smart building knowledge and utilizes a new context-awareness mechanism to provide contextual information. The former exploits the contextual information in reasoning to reduce the building energy consumption, promoting users behavioral change and maximizing the user's comfort to bring about a better energy efficiency policy. To evaluate our system, we have developed a smart building simulator (Open-SBS) which simulates smart building comportments and human behaviors. We have created various scenarios of daily life in the smart building simulator. We have tested our ICA-BEMS effect on energy consumption having a positive result. Energy consumption has been decreased by 40% of total energy consumption.