THT Control Oy (Finland)

Automation industry is moving towards more complex systems which are posing new challenges for operation from both machine and human perspectives. A group of challenges is related to management of the overwhelming information flow and to usability of the systems, and context-aware solutions have been recently introduced to the automation field in order to cope with challenges of this kind. The context awareness is seen as a solution which would allow to both the technological system and the human operator to infer the optimal decisions and to behave in the most effective way. In order to reach this capability, the external physical world and the system must be described in a way both interprétable for humans and machines. Ambition of this paper is to contribute to the context-aware (re)configuration of the system with a tool, which is designed to improve the efficiency of the configuration phase of a context-aware system. The tool provides a solution to configure and model the field devices of a system via automatically generated ontologies. This research is a part of a device management framework for a building automation use case, which is targeting to support controlling decisions of dwellers, technical support and social services.