ISES

ISES developed ICT building blocks to integrate and complement existing tools for design and operation management into a Virtual Energy Lab capable of evaluating, simulating and optimizing the energy efficiency of products and facilities, in particular components for buildings and facilities, before their realization and taking into account their stochastic life-cycle nature. For the energy-efficient design and operation of products the semantic contexts of several different roles were integrated. A holistic approach was applied to enable  efficient  use  of  today’s  loosely  connected  numerical  analysis  tools, modellers and graphical presentation tools and new stochastic methods were developed to deal with the random nature of energy profiles and consumption through the product life-cycle.

ISES focused on the following RTD issues:

• Interoperability between energy analysis tools and product and building design tools
• Interoperability between product design tools (STEP) and building and facility design tools (BIM)
• Energy profiles and consumption patterns for building facilities and components that are not yet adequately represented for stochastic treatments and are not generic enough
• Configurators and evaluators for combination of energy profiles for stochastic life-cycle consideration
• Multi-model concurrent engineering design for which only light-weight prototypes are currently available with regard to managing, filtering, navigation and evaluation services
• Intelligent and adaptable access and management methods for heterogeneous distributed information resources and services
• Intelligent and flexible interoperability methods for model and system interoperability based on ontology methods.

The objective of ISES was to develop a missing framework of components for beneficially applying existing ICT tools (CAD modellers, FM systems, different simulations and analysis tools, cost calculation tools, Building Automation Data Management Systems (BAS), and product models – STEP/BIM), and:

1. Provide them with an interoperability structure on ontology-extended BIM and SOA basis through development of a new model and system ontology based on description logic with semi- automatic simulation model configuration capabilities;
2. Complement them with a set of new supporting services and tools, enabling efficient simulation and evaluation of the energy life-cycle behaviour of products;
3. Provide a new information logistic and intelligent access controller for the ICT system management (services, tools and data) and for the interfacing to cloud facilities;
4. Extend existing data resources by
   • (a) stochastic based climatic data scenarios,
   • (b) usage/user activity profiles, and
   • (c) a database variant manager to manage the alternatives and variations of new product designs and their application in larger systems.

The targeted application domain was buildings and facilities. However, ISES was not only directed to construction and product development for construction. ISES developed products were generic, so that they can be also used in other domains or can serve as templates and best-practice cases.