Knowledge graphs (KGs) continue spreading into industrial use cases due to their advantages and superiority over classical data representations. A problem that has not yet adequately been solved for KGs is the traceability and provenance of changes, which can be required in an enterprise or by regulations. KGs typically contain the current snapshot of data valid at a certain moment in time only. Changes over time are usually not recorded and no change history exists. The lack of suitable and scalable traceability solutions hinders the wider application of KGs. This paper presents a traceability and provenance solution for KGs, which can track all changes of a KG on triple level. It comprises a provenance engine that intercepts SPARQL/Update queries; PROV-STAR, an RDF-star enabled light-weight extension of the Provenance Ontology (PROV-O) for representing changes and their provenance; and a SPARQL query transformation approach for tracking the changes on a separate provenance KG with SPARQL-star queries. The solution supports full traceability of all changes, on the lowest possible level of triples, with each change being comprehended with detailed provenance information. From the provenance KG a detailed change history can be retrieved, and any past version of the KG can be restored with a single query. The implementation and validation have shown that changes can be tracked at runtime during the normal operation of a KG. Furthermore, the solution is scalable to large KGs and frequent updates, as only the delta of each change is stored.

Common methods for submitting hardware- or comfort-related complaints in an office or industrial environment, such as online forms or via a telephone hotline, can lead to misinterpretations of the issue and/or be perceived as being cumbersome by the submitter. This can act as a barrier for the submission of feedback and thus cause the facility management to remain unaware of unsatisfactory comfort conditions or faults, which can result in further issues and costs. In order to reduce the submission effort, a novel software-based solution is proposed, which automatically determines the most probable complaints, suggests them to the user and, when possible, automatically solves them. This is achieved by employing detailed context information stemming from a Building Information Model, the Building Automation System and past complaints submitted by the occupants. This information is integrated and represented with semantic technologies, which allow to formally organize the information and describe the relationships between the data. The solution was implemented as an app and was demonstrated in a real office environment. The reduced effort of submitting feedback via the app led to a strong increase in the submission of comfort-related complaints, showing the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

The digital revolution in industry, buildings, and the Internet of Things will massively increase the number of sensor, actuator, and control devices in the near future. This will lead to the further automation of many tasks in the life cycle of the systems from design to commissioning and operation. Device and system models are a key enabler in this goal as they provide a holistic information pool that can be utilized by various tools and users along the life cycle. This paper analyzes the current state of the art of device and system models. It looks across different domains from industrial automation to building automation and sensor networks, defines the common tasks in their life cycle, and classifies the information required to execute and automate them. It compares 24 common device modeling approaches against these requirements and unveils how ready they are for the future and what they lack.

Interoperability of devices in automation systems is critical, but despite tremendous standardization efforts not achievable between all devices per se. Much effort needs to be spent on properly evaluating whether devices are interoperable, or on fixing incompatibilities. To improve that situation, a semantic interoperability evaluation model is presented in this paper. It enables an automatic, reliable interoperability evaluation of devices and constitutes a key enabler for a further (computerized) automation of the automation. The interoperability assessment is more reliable than what available state-of-the art engineering and commissioning tools can deliver. This is achieved by incorporating not only technical and syntactic criteria, but also the device semantics, a conceptual system model and optionally experiential knowledge, if available.

The papers in this special section introduce various new works in the area of semantic technologies in industrial informatics. They address common problems in the state of the art and illustrate the benefit of semantic technologies to automation in many practical scenarios.

The complexity and diversity of building automation systems (BAS) and the various faults that may happen in buildings make it very challenging to set up fault detection and diagnostics (FDD). This knowledge-intensive, expensive tasks urgently needs to be automated due to the limited time and budget available in this domain. A novel approach for computer-aided, automatic setup of FDD for BAS is described in this paper. Using the Web Ontology Language (OWL), the characteristics, requirements and necessary configuration of the FDD algorithms are formally specified in a machine-interpretable way. Also buildings and their BAS are described by OWL as building information model (BIM). Given these descriptions, the approach can match the specific characteristics and requirements of the FDD algorithms with the specific circumstances in the BAS in a formal evaluation process. All applicable FDD algorithms can be determined and subsequently configured to the individual characteristics of the BAS.

Several ontologies exist that model aspects of home or building automation systems for specific use cases. However, no comprehensive approach exists, that models building automation systems in a modular way to be usable in various use cases and tools. The paper proposes the BASont that addresses various use cases over the life cycle of a building automation system from design, to commissioning, to operation, and refurbishment. The use of the BASont is demonstrated for a data retrieval and self-commissioning use case.

Wireless building automation systems are gaining momentum as they promise an easy installation in old and new buildings. But, the design of wireless building automation systems is still an extensive manual process with little to no tool support. In result, the system commissioning ends in trial-and-error set-ups to identify interoperable devices, to solve issues with wireless signal propagation and to understand energy problems of nodes. This paper introduces a holistic design approach that addresses these common issues in wireless building automation system design. It takes up novel design concepts and tools from wired system design and combines them in a holistic tool environment that supports the engineer in his common work flow to efficiently design reliable wireless building automation systems.

Ontology-based Device Descriptions (ODDs) have been developed to overcome the shortcomings of established electronic device descriptions. They provide means for a comprehensive support of the whole design process of automation systems and enable an automated design. However, for a proper and faultless design support, the validity and integrity of the OWL based ODDs is essential. For that purpose this paper investigates formal validation techniques for a computerized verification of ODDs. Following, a validator is presented, which combines OWL reasoning with integrity constraints (ICs). The validator assures the consistency, completeness and correctness of ODDs and is capable of checking expressive logical constraints. An explanation component informs the user about constraint violations and gives advice on how to resolve them.

Ontology-based Device Descriptions (ODDs) have been developed and introduced as a novel electronic device description approach to realize an automated design of building automation systems. For their wide practical application however it is essential, that their creation and maintenance is as easy as possible. Therefore a generic specification toolchain for ODDs is introduced in this paper. It supports the user in four different ways: by reusing knowledge from existing device descriptions, by providing a generic user interface, by validating the user's inputs and by completing data with a rule-based approach.

Device descriptions play an important role in the design and commissioning of modern automation systems and help reducing the design time and costs. However, all established device descriptions are specialized for certain purposes and suffer from several weaknesses. This hinders a further design automation, which is strongly needed for the more and more complex automation systems. To overcome these problems, this paper presents novel Ontology-based Device Descriptions (ODDs) along with a layered ontology architecture and triple store based database backend. It enables a formal, unified and extensible specification of devices, ensures their comparability and facilitates a computer enabled retrieval, selection and interoperability evaluation. The scalability of the approach to several ten thousand devices is demonstrated.

The design of room automation systems is a challenging task with growing complexity and a high optimization potential. On the market, a high number of prefabricated devices from different manufacturers is available for a large variety of functions. This leads to a high number of device combinations and many design variants respectively, that should optimally realize the requirements. To overcome this problem, an efficient and scalable solution method is needed, that can create multi-vendor designs with high quality. In this paper, a method that deals successfully with this objective is presented including test results. With the abstract design of the system and additional requirements given, it can synthesize optimal multi-vendor system designs by using an efficient evolutionary algorithm with directed operations.

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.

Embedded systems are used in many domains today. However, the design process of these systems is complex and time-consuming. In automation domains the complexity can be decreased by using function block based designs to specify the functionality of the system to be created. But this has to be done still manually. This paper introduces an approach to generate such function block based designs automatically from requirements. Therefore a generative approach is used, where design patterns were assembled to complete designs. The pattern description and the generation process are realized by semantic Web technologies. The evaluation of the approach is exemplified by functional schematics of room automation designs.

The planning and design of building automation systems is a time consuming, error prone and nowadays more and more expensive task, consisting of a lot of repeated manual design steps done by specialized engineers. To reduce the engineering costs for such systems, the authors present a new automated top-down design approach within this paper. A knowledge-based system supports the planner at the requirement analysis by means of a guided dialog. Subsequently, the complete automation system is automatically designed in two steps. The abstract design proceeds a design based on platform- and manufacturer-independent function blocks via generative programming. The detailed design replaces the function blocks by platform- and manufacturer-specific profiles by means of evolutionary techniques.