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Ontologies for Energy Efficiency

Type: 
Bachelor or Master
Supervisor: 
Student name: 
none

Home automation systems that automatically control a variety of appliances, sensors and actuators (e.g., heating, ventilation, air conditioning, lighting, alarm devices, leakage detectors, fire detectors, etc.) in their interaction with users, can offer significant contribution to the comfort and safety of living, pollution reduction, environment protection, and what is getting increasingly important, energy conservation. To achieve an efficient energy management in such user-responsive smart environments, a tight integration among a system that measures the energy consumption, and provides information about the available energy and its cost (known as Smart Metering systems), and the environment automation system, in addition to the user input and the state of the environment and devices, must be established. Energy efficient smart home is characterized with complex interactions between people and devices, and at the higher hierarchical level, it itself is involved in interactions with other energy consumers and energy suppliers. The proposed thesis work will be associated with the FTW’s (http://www.ftw.at) activities dealing with energy efficiency in automated networked environments, in particular an FFG project SESAME: Semantic Smart Metering: Enablers for Energy Efficiency (http://sesame.ftw.at). This thesis project will aim at reviewing the state of the art in the relevant areas and defining a prototypical set of ontologies defining the appliances, sensors and actuators, or represent different stakeholders in the energy market. The project shall evaluate how semantics can support controlled, secure coordination of the distributed system functionality (including user interactions), and contribute to: - Creation and maintenance of the system ontology, including flexible management, storage, manipulation, and selection of the actual instance sets describing the current set up of the environment and devices in the system. - Creation and management (storing, activating) of policies that reflect the preferences and constraints regarding the energy consumption and system control. - Multi-objective policy-based reasoning for energy-efficiency.