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In a time where sustainability and CO2 efficiency are of ever-increasing importance, heating systems deserve special considerations. Despite well-functioning hardware, inefficiencies may arise when controller parameters are not well chosen. While monitoring systems could help to identify such issues, they lack improvement suggestions. One possible solution would be the use of digital twins; however, critical values such as the water consumption of the residents can often not be acquired for accurate models. To address this issue, coarse models can be employed to generate quantitative predictions, which can then be interpreted qualitatively to assess “better or worse” system behavior. In this paper, we present a simulation and calibration framework as well as a preprocessing module. These components can be run locally or deployed as containerized microservices and are easy to interface with existing data acquisition infrastructure. We evaluate the two main operating modes, namely automatic model calibration, using measured data, and the optimization of controller parameters. Our results show that using a coarse model of a real heating system and data augmentation through preprocessing, it is possible to achieve an acceptable fit of partially incomplete measured data, and that the calibrated model can subsequently be used to perform an optimization of the controller parameters in regard to the simulated boiler gas consumption.

Modern knowledge base systems frequently need to combine a collection of databases in different formats: e.g., relational databases, XML databases, rule bases, ontologies, etc. In the deductive database system DDBASE, we can manage these different formats of knowledge and reason about them. Even the file systems on different computers can be part of the knowledge base. Often, it is necessary to handle different versions of a knowledge base. E.g., we might want to find out common parts or differences of two versions of a relational database. We will examine the use of abstractions of rule bases by predicate dependency and rule predicate graphs. Also the proof trees of derived atoms can help to compare different versions of a rule base. Moreover, it might be possible to have derivations joining rules with other formalisms of knowledge representation. Ontologies have shown their benefits in many applications of intelligent systems, and there have been many proposals for rule languages compatible with the semantic web stack, e.g., SWRL, the semantic web rule language. Recently, ontologies are used in hybrid systems for specifying the provenance of the different components.

System relevant embedded software needs to be reliable and, therefore, well tested, especially for aerospace systems. A common technique to verify programs is the analysis of their abstract syntax tree (AST). Tree structures can be elegantly analyzed with the logic programming language Prolog. Moreover, Prolog offers further advantages for a thorough analysis: On the one hand, it natively provides versatile options to efficiently process tree or graph data structures. On the other hand, Prolog's non-determinism and backtracking eases tests of different variations of the program flow without big effort. A rule-based approach with Prolog allows to characterize the verification goals in a concise and declarative way. In this paper, we describe our approach to verify the source code of a flash file system with the help of Prolog. The flash file system is written in C++ and has been developed particularly for the use in satellites. We transform a given abstract syntax tree of C++ source code into Prolog facts and derive the call graph and the execution sequence (tree), which then are further tested against verification goals. The different program flow branching due to control structures is derived by backtracking as subtrees of the full execution sequence. Finally, these subtrees are verified in Prolog. We illustrate our approach with a case study, where we search for incorrect applications of semaphores in embedded software using the real-time operating system RODOS. We rely on computation tree logic (CTL) and have designed an embedded domain specific language (DSL) in Prolog to express the verification goals.

The methods to access large relational databases in a distributed system are well established: the relational query language SQL often serves as a language for data access and manipulation, and in addition public interfaces are exposed using communication protocols like REST. Similarly to REST, GraphQL is the query protocol of an application layer developed by Facebook. It provides a unified interface between the client and the server for data fetching and manipulation. Using GraphQL's type system, it is possible to specify data handling of various sources and to combine, e.g., relational with NoSQL databases. In contrast to REST, GraphQL provides a single API endpoint and supports flexible queries over linked data. GraphQL can also be used as an interface for deductive databases. In this paper, we give an introduction of GraphQL and a comparison to REST. Using language features recently added to SWI-Prolog 7, we have developed the Prolog library GraphQL.pl, which implements the GraphQL type system and query syntax as a domain-specific language with the help of definite clause grammars (DCG), quasi quotations, and dicts. Using our library, the type system created for a deductive database can be validated, while the query system provides a unified interface for data access and introspection.