A Hybrid Method for an Integral Function Description of Building Services

Automation systems have been becoming ubiquitous in modern buildings. Despite the benefits they can bring in terms of productivity, energy efficiency and comfort improvements, they often lack interoperable descriptions of the basis functions of the systems they control, for instance Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning systems (HVAC). This situation hinders the implementation of methods aiming at automatizing the commissioning and the supervision of the operation of building services and thus enabling a better energy performance of buildings. In an attempt to address this issue, we propose a hybrid approach for the digital description of control functions in Building Automation and Control Systems (BACS), combining the features of existing ontologies and of a global standard for industrial control programming.