Context-aware optimization strategies for universal application in smart building energy management

Abstract

In building operation, the continuous forward planning of energy-efficient schedules to maintain user comfort is a challenging task. Although the design of building energy management systems is an active field of research, existing solutions are often faced with limited reusability due to specialization on certain buildings, comfort parameters, or building automation technologies. Thus, this work introduces a set of context-aware strategies that are generally applicable for the optimization in building energy management systems. For this purpose, machinereadable semantics of the building and the building automation system is exploited in order to design a heuristic approach. The aim is to reduce the optimization effort while targeting both energy efficiency and cross-domain comfort satisfaction on a building-independent level. An embedding of the proposed approach into common metaheuristics is described to provide a basis for further reuse. Finally, case studies are used for evaluation of a proof-of-concept implementation.