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.