Semantic BMS: Allowing usage of building automation data in facility benchmarking

Facility benchmarking and evaluation of facility performance are the crucial tasks in reaching efficient, economical and sustainable facility operation. Modern buildings are equipped with building automation systems (BAS) that contain vast numbers of various sensors that can be utilised in performance assessment. However, such systems lack convenient tools for data inspection, which limits their use in building performance and efficiency analysis and benchmarking especially on large sites. The paper presents a middleware layer designed to enrich BAS data with additional semantic information. As a semantic model, an adaptation of the Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) ontology for the field of building operation analysis is used. The middleware provides convenient interfaces for querying the model. The proposed system provides the facility managers with a convenient way to use the BAS data for benchmarking and decision support.