Upgrading BRICKS—The Context-Aware Semantic Rule-Based System for Intelligent Building Energy and Security Management

Abstract

Building management systems (BMSs) are being implemented broadly by industries in recent decades. However, BMSs focus on specific domains, and when installed on the same building, they lack interoperability to work on a centralized user interface. On the other hand, BMSs interoperability allows the implementation of complex rules based on multi-domain contexts. The Building’s Reasoning for Intelligent Control Knowledge-based System (BRICKS) is a context-aware semantic rule-based system for the intelligent management of buildings’ energy and security. It uses ontologies and semantic web technologies to interact with different domains, taking advantage of cross-domain knowledge to apply context-based rules. This work upgrades the previously presented version of BRICKS by including services for energy consumption and generation forecast, demand response, a configuration user interface (UI), and a dynamic building monitoring and management UI. The case study demonstrates BRICKS deployed at different aggregation levels in the authors’ laboratory building, managing a demand response event and interacting autonomously with other BRICKS instances. The results validate the correct functioning of the proposed tool, which contributes to the flexibility, efficiency, and security of building energy systems.