The building sector is undergoing a deep transformation to contribute to meeting the climate neutrality goals set by policymakers worldwide. This process entails the transition towards smart energy-aware buildings that have lower consumptions and better efficiency performance. Digitalization is a key part of this process. A huge amount of data is currently generated by sensors, smart meters and a multitude of other devices and data sources, and this trend is expected to exponentially increase in the near future. Exploiting these data for different use cases spanning multiple application scenarios is of utmost importance to capture their full value and build smart and innovative building services. In this context, this paper presents a high-level architecture for big data management in the building domain which aims to foster data sharing, interoperability and the seamless integration of advanced services based on data-driven techniques. This work focuses on the functional description of the architecture, underlining the requirements and specifications to be addressed as well as the design principles to be followed. Moreover, a concrete example of the instantiation of such an architecture, based on open source software technologies, is presented and discussed.

With the ongoing digital transformation and multi-domain interaction occurring in the buildings, a huge amount of heterogeneous data is generated and stored on a daily basis. To take advantage of the gathered data and help better decision makings, suitable methods are needed to meet the demand for building operations and reinvestment planning. Ontology, which provides not only the vocabulary of a certain domain but also the relationship between each other has been used in multiple engineering fields to manage heterogeneous data. A plethora of ontology development methodologies have been developed in the last decade, whereas those methods are still really time-consuming and in a low degree of automation. In this paper, we approach the problem by first presenting a semi-automatic ontology development framework that integrates existing automatic ontology tools and reuses existing ontology and data model. Based on this framework, we create a building energy management ontology and evaluate the data coverage of several real-life data sets.

Data integration in the energy sector, which refers to the process of combining and harmonizing data from multiple heterogeneous sources, is becoming increasingly difficult due to the growing volume of heterogeneous data. Schema matching plays a crucial role in this process by giving each representation a unique identity by matching raw energy data to a generic data model. This study uses an energy domain language model to automate schema matching, reducing manual effort in integrating heterogeneous data. We developed two energy domain language models, Energy BERT and Energy Sentence Bert, and trained them using an open-source scientific corpus. The comparison of the developed models with the baseline model using real-life energy domain data shows that Energy BERT and Energy Sentence Bert models significantly improve the accuracy of schema matching.

The increase in heterogeneous data in the building energy domain creates a difficult challenge for data integration. Schema matching, which maps the raw data from the building energy domain to a generic data model, is the necessary step in data integration and provides a unique representation. Only a small amount of labeled data for schema matching exists and it is time-consuming and labor-intensive to manually label data. This paper applies semantic-similarity methods to the automatic schema-mapping process by combining knowledge from natural language processing, which reduces the manual effort in heterogeneous data integration. The active-learning method is applied to solve the lack-of-labeled-data problem in schema matching. The results of the schema matching with building-energy-domain data show the pre-trained language model provides a massive improvement in the accuracy of schema matching and the active-learning method greatly reduces the amount of labeled data required.

This paper examines artificial intelligence (AI) bias in power systems applications through systematic analysis of three critical use cases: load forecasting, predictive maintenance, and ontology matching for system interoperability. While AI solutions show great potential for addressing complex power system challenges, they face adoption barriers due to biases that compromise fairness, reliability, and operational performance. Our investigation demonstrates how different bias types—including data representation, algorithmic, and sampling biases—manifest in power systems contexts, directly affecting grid efficiency, resource allocation, and socioeconomic equity across the electrical power and energy domain. For each use case, we provide quantitative evidence of bias impact and propose targeted mitigation strategies that emphasize data diversity, ensemble methods, explainable AI techniques, and fairness-aware algorithms. By establishing a comprehensive taxonomy of bias types relevant to power systems and developing practical mitigation frameworks, this work bridges the critical gap between abstract bias concepts and real-world power system applications. The resulting framework provides a structured approach for developing equitable, robust AI systems that align with power systems’ operational requirements while accelerating the responsible adoption of AI in safety-critical infrastructure.

We present our development of a co-simulation scenario ontology that provides a semantic framework for describing, sharing, comparing, and executing simulation scenarios, thereby enhancing interoperability and reproducibility.The ontology is created through a structured development process following the Linked Open Terms methodology.