OntoAgency: An agency-based ontology for tracing control, ownership and decision-making in smart buildings

Abstract

This article proposes an agency-based design ontology (OntoAgency) to systematically trace the relationships between stakeholders who own, control, and decide upon the benefits and experiences provided by smart building services. The ontology associates ‘smartness’ to different building operation domains and assigns their functionalities to agents involved in the flow of data and decision making. It enables control paths to be traced back to specific people, machines, and companies behind smart operations – including those that appear to be ‘external’ to a smart building. Based on Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the ontology connects knowledge from the social sciences to technical knowledge from building design, construction, operation and controls. The need in developing this ontology originates from the limits of conventional design and engineering ontologies, particularly with respect to their unproblematic take on the interplay between different social and technical systems and their neglect to model the varied abilities of stakeholders to exert control over, and benefit from, the technical systems and operations. The proposed ontology addresses these gaps by offering a more realistic and versatile model of inter-agents relationships. It can also highlight points of consented and unconsented data leakage and associated security issues. This knowledge becomes critical for designing and managing increasingly more complex smart building systems.