Towards an Expert System for Energy Saving and User Engagement in Existing Buildings

The purpose of this industry case is to describe an ICT method relying on semantic web technologies for enabling energy savings in buildings by influencing the behavior of their users. This work is part of an European research project named eTEACHER that aims at empowering energy end-users to achieve energy savings while respecting comfort and health conditions within buildings. The project shall provide as outcomes ICT solutions that process data from building energy and control systems and that deliver tailored information enabling behavioral change of end-users. In this way, building end-users (householders, facility managers, office employees, staff, school teachersEL) shall be able to identify energy use improvements that they can undertake by themselves and integrate in their daily activities. In that context, the presented work specifically develops a software component that shall perform a semantic analysis of building operation states in order to provide the end-users with recommendations in terms of energy conservation measures to engage their behavioral change for saving energy.