EROSO: Semantic Technologies Towards Thermal Comfort in Workplaces

Thermal comfort in workplaces not only has a direct impact on occupants working efficiency, but also on their morale and health. Therefore, there is a need to establish HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning) control strategies that ensure comfortable thermal situations in these environments. KDD (Knowledge Discovery in Databases) processes may be used to calculate optimal HVAC control strategies that could ensure thermal comfort within a workplace. This paper presents EROSO (thERmal cOmfort SOlution), a framework that combines KDD processes and Semantic Technologies for ensuring thermal comfort in workplaces. Specifically, this paper focuses on EROSO’s approach for supporting the KDD’s Interpretation phase where Semantic Technologies are used to obtain an explanation of predictive model’s temperature predictions with regards to the thermal comfort regulations they satisfy. Furthermore, this result interpretation supports facility managers in the task of selecting the optimal HVAC control strategies. The EROSO framework is implemented in a real workplace and it is compared with an already existing solution implemented in the same physical scenario. Results show that Semantic Technologies make the proposed solution more usable and extensible, as well as ensuring a thermal comfort situation throughout the working day.