  The Advent of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm has brought opportunities
to solve many real-world problems. Energy management, for example, has
attracted huge interest from academia, industries, governments and regulatory
bodies. It involves collecting energy usage data, analyzing it, and optimizing
the energy consumption by applying control strategies. However, in industrial
environments, performing such optimization is not trivial. The changes in
business rules, process control, and customer requirements make it much more
challenging. In this paper, a Semantic Rules Engine (SRE) for industrial
gateways is presented that allows implementing dynamic and flexible rule-based
control strategies. It is simple, expressive, and allows managing rules
on-the-fly without causing any service interruption. Additionally, it can
handle semantic queries and provide results by inferring additional knowledge
from previously defined concepts in ontologies. SRE has been validated and
tested on different hardware platforms and in commercial products. Performance
evaluations are also presented to validate its conformance to the customer
requirements.
