PI: Mario Berges
Co-PI(s): Yuvraj Agarwal
University: Carnegie Mellon University
Industry partner: Johnson Controls International
Decarbonization efforts are pushing us to automate and coordinate electrical loads in buildings in increasingly complex ways in order to facilitate the integration of intermittent and unpredictable renewable energy sources and improve energy efficiency. This requires the ability to semantically describe and annotate building assets in a common way so that control algorithms can reason about and utilize them when needed. There have been significant efforts towards this digitization over the last decade, including standardized semantic models such as the Brick Schema. This project aims to further the reach and impact of the Brick schema in grid-enabled buildings, allowing it to describe the inherent “flexibility” of a building (i.e., its ability to modulate energy use without impacting the quality of the service it is providing to its occupants). We will specifically focus on the flexibility provided by thermostatically controlled loads (TCLs) in commercial buildings. We will test the extended ontology on a series of validation experiments using buildings from our Industry partner’s clients.