Semantic Provisioning of IoT Devices for Autonomous Fault Detection Services

In many buildings, between 5% and 30% of energy is wasted during operation because technical systems are not operated correctly or in an energy-efficient manner. Existing solutions in the form of digital services, e.g. for fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) or data-driven energy audits, are hardly used in existing buildings because of the high costs for retrofitting necessary equipment with sensors and related hardware, as well as for implementing suitable software for data management and analysis. Our goal is to drastically reduce the cost of introducing digital services to optimize energy and load management by tracking faults and malfunctions in heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems, thus enabling significant savings in energy, cost and CO2 emissions in the building sector. Cost reduction is achieved through wirelessly networked sensor technology with automated metadata and data transfer to a smart database that automatically integrates supplied metadata and data into appropriate digital energy services. For that purpose, external ontologies are for a part used, and for another part newly developed, to create the smart database that allows for automatic selection, adaptation and execution of energy monitoring services. These new scalable digital services are deployed and tested at Munich airport using a so-called semantic provisioning workflow.