Brick FunctionBlocks

Brick FunctionBlocks (FB) abstract a bunch of Points and their complex relationships with input/output interface and its descriptions. This 1) provides a more high-level view of a set of Points and Equipment, 2) explicitly represents what to control for affecting a target, and 3) enables modular composition of components for a higher level view.

Design Goals

• Input/Output per FB.
• Instantiate existing Point instances as Input and Ouput.
• Each FB class may have functional description as annotations.
• Control dependencies across Points.

RDF Model

TODO

Repository Structure

• schemas/brick_fb.ttl: It has meta structure for FBs.
• schemas/standard_fbs.ttl: It has standard FBs. One may directly instantiate or extend it.
• graphs/*.ttl: Example graphs.
• apply_vav_fb.ttl: A single Python script to automatically instantiate FBs for possible entities (e.g., if there is a VAV, you can instantiate vavfb automatically and associate the VAV's Points with the FB.
• example_queries.py: Example queries over FBs.

Examples

VAV and Damper

TODO

Heat Exchanger

TODO

Possible future extentions

• Map to OpenBuildings/Modelical model to make exact control sequences queriable.

Notes

• I wanted to implement a namespace itself as a FunctionBlock class, but it is not allowed in SPARQL. E.g., vavfb: rdfs:subClassOf fb:FunctionBlock may be defined in Turtle, but not allowed in SPARQL.