Semantic Technologies in Practical Demand Response: An Information Requirement-based Roadmap

The transition to a modern and efficient future grid relies on the seamless coordination of distributed energy resources and applications such as Demand Response (DR). While this transformation enables greater sustainability, it inevitably increases grid complexity and decentralization, requiring the effective coordination of millions of hardware assets and software agents. Realizing this vision demands advances in interoperability to ensure these heterogeneous systems can communicate without prohibitive customization costs. Semantic interoperability aims to address this by leveraging ontologies to guarantee the unambiguous interpretation of exchanged data. However, current semantic ontologies in the commercial building and DR domains face two critical limitations. First, existing ontologies are often developed without a formal framework that reflects real-world DR requirements. Second, proposals for integrating general (e.g., Brick) and DR-specific ontologies (e.g., EFOnt) remain mostly conceptual, lacking formalization or empirical validation.

In this paper, we begin to address these gaps by applying a formal ontology evaluation/development approach to define the information requirements (IRs) necessary for semantic interoperability, focusing on incentive-based DR programs for commercial buildings in the United States as a starting point. We identify the IRs associated with each stage of the incentive-based DR. Using these IRs, we evaluate how well existing ontologies, specifically Brick, DELTA, EFOnt, and CIM support the operational needs of DR participation. Our findings reveal substantial gaps between current ontologies and practical DR requirements. Based on our evaluation, we propose a roadmap of necessary extensions and integrations for these ontologies. This work ultimately aims to enhance the interoperability of today’s and future smart grid, thereby facilitating scalable integration of DR systems into the grid’s complex operational framework.