OPM: An Ontology-Based Package Manager for Building Operating Systems

An ontology-based package manager for Building Operating Systems that resolves dependencies semantically – across hardware, sensor capabilities, and the building’s physical layout. Where apt or npm can only express syntactic dependencies, OPM treats ‘needs a temperature sensor in this room’ as a first-class dependency type and verifies the building actually satisfies it before deploying a service. Result: significantly reduced deployment and maintenance time for BOS-based DR services.

research
building operating systems
ontology
package manager
smart grid
demand response
11th International Conference on the Internet of Things (IoT 2021), pp. 118–125. ACM.
Authors

Jakob Hviid

Aslak Johansen

Fisayo Caleb Sangogboye

Mikkel Baun Kjærgaard

Published

March 8, 2022

Publication

Abstract

The energy sector is experiencing new challenges with the move to green energy. One of these challenges is keeping a stable energy grid when transitioning the production to unpredictable energy generation from green sources. Demand Response (DR) can mitigate some of the lack of predictability by influencing the consumer’s load profile. Unfortunately, the cost of implementing DR, and the required infrastructure, vastly overshadows the benefits for the consumer, thereby negating the incentive to invest. Reducing the initial cost of investment is a critical factor for the success of DR.

Building Operating Systems (BOS) is one possible avenue to achieve DR functionality in buildings. This paper seeks to reduce initial investment costs of BOSes, by introducing an ontology-based package manager (OPM), that dynamically resolves dependencies and installs services. An ontology-based approach to dependency resolution allows for loosely defined dependencies but also takes the context of the service into account, as well as requirements in terms of sensor availability and physical layout of the building.

The OPM is evaluated by deploying a BOS and accompanying services for occupancy prediction. By significantly reducing deployment complexity, results show considerable time savings, and thereby cost reductions, on deployment and maintenance activities.

Key contributions

  • Ontology-based dependency resolution utilising the Service Abstraction Layer (SAL), effectively creating a package manager for container-based applications.
  • Loose dependency satisfaction – not just direct, but ontology-derived match (e.g., a sensor that fulfils a capability counts).
  • Verifies that no other pre-existing service satisfies a dependency before deployment.
  • Validates hardware requirements and dependencies on physical parameters of the built environment.
  • Containerised deployment integrated into the BOS ecosystem.

Why this matters

Traditional package managers (apt, yum, npm) resolve syntactic dependencies. Buildings are physical, and a dependency such as “needs a temperature sensor in this room” or “needs an actuator with a specific control range” cannot be expressed in those terms. OPM treats those building-physical constraints as first-class dependency types – a step toward making BOS deployments as cheap as containerised software deployments elsewhere.

Citation

Hviid, J., Johansen, A., Sangogboye, F. C., & Kjærgaard, M. B. (2022). OPM: An Ontology-Based Package Manager for Building Operating Systems. In 11th International Conference on the Internet of Things (IoT ’21), pp. 118–125. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3494322.3494338