OpenADR Ontology: Semantic Enrichment of Demand Response Strategies in Smart Grids

Demand Response (DR) gains increasing attention as a core building block of smart grids. Advanced ICT systems have been made available in the last decades and have been employed already in commercial energy markets. As more and more hardware and software solutions are flooding the market, the need for interoperability among systems has become a necessity. Building upon OpenADR, a well-known standard for DR, this work presents its semantic enrichment towards transforming it into an ontology (publicly available), which ultimately enables semantic interoperability among various DR stakeholders and systems and other semantic-related features like data validation, reusing terms and integration with other standard ontologies. Following the Linked Open Terms methodology, a detailed description of the main OpenADR services is presented, encoded in OWL, along with needed extensions that derive from other well-known ontologies. By introducing an OpenADR ontology, the adoption and deployment of OpenADR in both research and industrial implementations is expected to expand, ultimately promoting significantly semantic interoperability in DR systems.