A review of ontologies for smart and continuous commissioning

TL;DR

This paper critically reviews building data ontologies used in smart and continuous commissioning, highlighting gaps and proposing future research directions to improve building performance and fault detection.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of existing ontologies in SCCx, identifies key gaps such as lack of holistic approaches, and offers recommendations for future research and open-source development.

Findings

Majority of ontologies focus on building data types from BIM and BMS.

Applications include KPI calculation, performance improvement, fault detection.

Identified gaps include the need for holistic ontologies and evaluation methods.

Abstract

Smart and continuous commissioning (SCCx) of buildings can result in a significant reduction in the gap between design and operational performance. Ontologies play an important role in SCCx as they facilitate data readability and reasoning by machines. A better understanding of ontologies is required in order to develop and incorporate them in SCCx. This paper critically reviews the state-of-the-art research on building data ontologies since 2014 within the SCCx domain through sorting them based on building data types, general approaches, and applications. The data types of two main domains of building information modeling and building management system have been considered in the majority of existing ontologies. Three main applications are evident from a critical analysis of existing ontologies: (1) key performance indicator calculation, (2) building performance improvement, and (3) fault detection and diagnosis. The key gaps found in the literature review are a holistic ontology for SCCx and insight on how such approaches should be evaluated. Based on these findings, this study provides recommendations for future necessary research including: identification of SCCx-related data types, assessment of ontology performance, and creation of open-source approaches.