A normative approach to multi-agent systems for intelligent buildings

Building Management Systems (BMS) are widely adopted in modern buildings around the world in order to provide high-quality building services, and reduce the running cost of the building. However, most BMS are functionality-oriented and do not consider user personalization. The aim of this research is to capture and represent building management rules using organizational semiotics methods. We implement Semantic Analysis, which determines semantic units in building management and their relationship patterns of behaviour, and Norm Analysis, which extracts and specifies the norms that establish how and when these management actions occur. Finally, we propose a multi-agent framework for norm based building management. This framework contributes to the design domain of intelligent building management system by defining a set of behaviour patterns, and the norms that govern the real-time behaviour in a building.

Intelligent agents enabling negotiated control of pervasive environments

One of the important goals of the intelligent buildings especially in commercial applications is not only to minimize the energy consumption but also to enhance the occupant’s comfort. However, most of current development in the intelligent buildings focuses on an implementation of the automatic building control systems that can support energy efficiency approach. The consideration of occupants’ preferences is not adequate. To improve occupant’s wellbeing and energy efficiency in intelligent environments, we develop four types of agent combined together to form a multi-agent system to control the intelligent buildings. Users’ preferential conflicts are discussed. Furthermore, a negotiation mechanism for conflict resolution, has been proposed in order to reach an agreement, and has been represented in syntax directed translation schemes for future implementation and testing. Keywords: conflict resolution, intelligent buildings, multi-agent systems (MAS), negotiation strategy, syntax directed translation schemes (SDTS).

Sustainability assessment indicators and methodology for intelligent buildings

The sustainable intelligent building is a building that has the best combination of environmental, social, economic and technical values. And its sustainability assessment is related with system engineering methods and multi-criteria decision-making. Therefore firstly, the wireless monitoring system of sustainable parameters for intelligent buildings is achieved; secondly, the indicators and key issues based on the “whole life circle” for sustainability of intelligent buildings are researched; thirdly, the sustainable assessment model identified on the structure entropy and fuzzy analytic hierarchy process is proposed.