Knowledge-based Services for Creating Functional Models of Building Automation Components

Building automation systems have enabled advanced applications for reducing energy consumption and providing comfort in living and working environments. This incurs increasing engineering complexity, raising the need for automated engineering approaches in the future. As a consequence, a high quantity of detailed formal models of building automation component functionality needs to be created by component manufacturers. However, this task is not yet sufficiently supported by design tools, which renders it very arduous and error-prone. As a possible solution, this paper aims to provide a foundation for developing appropriate support functionality. Based on a detailed analysis of available knowledge sources for modeling support, exemplary suggestion services are discussed and evaluated. These web-based services can be integrated in legacy modeling tools in order to reduce the overall effort of the component modeling process by 60 % to 70 %.