How to Play Tag: A Formalization of Semantic Interoperability to Catch Semantics in Building Automation

As typical representatives of complex systems-of-systems, building automation systems (BAS) are a promising concept for future living and working environments. Yet, with increasing engineering complexity the need for automated systems engineering approaches and automated interoperability assessments based on models of data semantics arises. Current approaches for modeling semantics mostly focus on representing already operational BAS and fail to provide expressive semantics with sufficient detail for interoperability analyses. To close this gap, this paper proposes a semantic interoperability framework that introduces formal compatibility assessments for a flexible tag-based semantics modeling framework. Functional component models are extended by expressive tag-based models of semantics and declarative as well as imperative formal representations of compatibility assessments are introduced. The applicability and usefulness of automated compatibility assessments are subsequently investigated, providing a cornerstone for the proliferation automated engineering of BAS.