A semantic Requirement Ontology for the engineering of building automation systems by means of OWL

The increasing complexity of modern building automation systems (BAS) results in higher initial investment costs for BAS compared to the costs for conventional building installation. This fact scares many potential customers off the application of BAS, although these systems offer significant energy cost saving potential. To reduce investment costs for BAS, automated design processes offer significant optimization potential. For such an automated design process, consistent requirements for the individual BAS are mandatory. Within this paper, the authors propose a solution for a requirement ontology which is based on the knowledge representation language OWL (Web ontology language) for the automated design process of BAS.