Multi-agent building control in shared environment

Multi-agent systems have been adopted to build intelligent environment in recent years. It was claimed that energy efficiency and occupants' comfort were the most important factors for evaluating the performance of modem work environment, and multi-agent systems presented a viable solution to handling the complexity of dynamic building environment. While previous research has made significant advance in some aspects, the proposed systems or models were often not applicable in a "shared environment". This paper introduces an ongoing project on multi-agent for building control, which aims to achieve both energy efficiency and occupants' comfort in a shared environment.

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).

Post-occupancy evaluation studies in recently refurbished office building: energy performance and employees' satisfaction

Existing buildings contribute greatly to global energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. In the UK, about 18% of carbon emissions are generated by non-domestic buildings; sustainable building refurbishment can play an important role in reducing carbon emissions. This paper looks at the performance of a recently refurbished 5-storey office building in London, in terms of energy consumption as well as occupants’ satisfaction. Pre- and post-occupancy evaluation studies were conducted using online questionnaire surveys and energy consumption evaluation. Results from pre-occupancy and post-occupancy evaluation studies showed that employees, in general, were more satisfied with their work environment at the refurbished building than with that of their previous office. Employees’ self-reported productivity improved after the move to Elms House. These surveys showed a positive relationship between employees’ satisfaction with their work environment and their self-reported productivity, well-being and enjoyment at work. The factor that contributed to increasing employee satisfaction the most was: better use of interior space. Although the refurbishment was a success in terms of reducing energy consumption per m2, the performance gap was almost 3 times greater than that estimated. Unregulated loads, problems with building control, ineffective use of space and occupants’ behaviour are argued to be reasons for this gap.

Modeling of active holonic control systems for intelligent buildings

Building facilities have become important infrastructures for modern productive plants dedicated to services. In this context, the control systems of intelligent buildings have evolved while their reliability has evidently improved. However, the occurrence of faults is inevitable in systems conceived, constructed and operated by humans. Thus, a practical alternative approach is found to be very useful to reduce the consequences of faults. Yet, only few publications address intelligent building modeling processes that take into consideration the occurrence of faults and how to manage their consequences. In the light of the foregoing, a procedure is proposed for the modeling of intelligent building control systems, considersing their functional specifications in normal operation and in the of the event of faults. The proposed procedure adopts the concepts of discrete event systems and holons, and explores Petri nets and their extensions so as to represent the structure and operation of control systems for intelligent buildings under normal and abnormal situations. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Distributed MPC for Thermal Comfort and Load Allocation with Energy Auction

This paper presents a distributed predictive control methodology for indoor thermal comfort that optimizes the consumption of a limited shared energy resource using an integrated demand-side management approach that involves a power price auction and an appliance loads allocation scheme. The control objective for each subsystem (house or building) aims to minimize the energy cost while maintaining the indoor temperature inside comfort limits. In a distributed coordinated multi-agent ecosystem, each house or building control agent achieves its objectives while sharing, among them, the available energy through the introduction of particular coupling constraints in their underlying optimization problem. Coordination is maintained by a daily green energy auction bring in a demand-side management approach. Also the implemented distributed MPC algorithm is described and validated with simulation studies.

Aplicação da linha de equilíbrio no planeamento e controlo da construção

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Engenharia Civil

ArkWood-case puumuovitalo

Rakennusalalla kehitetään uusia materiaaleja ja rakennuslainsäädäntö muuttuu kiivaaseen tahtiin. Kilpailu alalla kiristyy ja tarvitaan uusia toimintatapoja rakentamisen kaikissa vaiheissa aina suunnittelusta toteutukseen. Puumuovikomposiitti on Suomessa uudehko rakennusmateriaali. Tässä työssä selvitetään tällä hetkellä voimassa olevien rakennusmääräysten ja standardien asettamia vaatimuksia puumuovikomposiittien käytölle rakentamisessa Suomessa sekä kehitetään omaa yritystoimintaa laatimalla oman yrityksen liiketoimintasuunnitelma. Tässä diplomityössä on laadittu puumuovikomposiittitalon rakennuslupapiirustukset ja selvitetty, kuinka Lappeenrannan rakennusvalvonta suhtautuu puumuovikomposiitin käyttöön kyseessä olevassa kohteessa rakennuslupahakemusvaiheessa. Suunnitellusta puumuovitalosta on pyydetty tarjoukset talotoimittajilta ja arvioitu puumuovikomposiitin käytön vaikutusta rakentamisen kokonaiskustannuksiin. Liiketoimintasuunnitelman laadinnassa on hyödynnetty aihealueeseen liittyvää kirjallisuutta ja julkaisuja yhdistäen niihin omia näkemyksiä ja ideoita.

Multi-agent collaboration for decision support in shared zones of intelligent buildings

In domain of intelligent buildings, saving energy in buildings and increasing preferences of occupants are two important factors. These factors are the important keys for evaluating the performance of work environment. In recent years, many researchers combine these areas to create the system that can change from original to the modern work environment called intelligent work environment. Due to advance of agent technology, it has received increasing attention in the area of intelligent pervasive environments. In this paper, we review several issues in intelligent buildings, with respect to the implementation of control system for intelligent buildings via multi-agent systems. Furthermore, we present the MASBO (Multi-Agent System for Building cOntrol) that has been implemented for controlling the building facilities to reach the balancing between energy efficiency and occupant’s comfort. In addition to enhance the MASBO system, the collaboration through negotiation among agents is presented.

Striving for inclusive design in the built environment: learning strategy adopted by policy implementers at local authorities in England

The research will explore views on inclusive design policy implementation and learning strategy used in practice by Local Authorities’ planning, building control and policy departments in England. It reports emerging research findings. The research aim was developed from an extensive literature review, and informed by a pilot study with relevant Local Authority departments. The pilot study highlighted gaps within the process of policy implementation, a lack of awareness of the process and flaws in the design guidance policy. This has helped inform the development of a robust research design using both a survey and semi-structured interviews. The questionnaire targeted key employees within Local Authorities designed to establish how employees learn about inclusive design policy and to determine their views on current approaches of inclusive design policy implementation adopted by their Local Authorities. The questionnaire produces 117 responses. Interestingly approximately 9 out of 129 Local Authorities approached claimed that they were unable to participate either because an inclusive design policy was not adopted or they were faced with a high workload and thus unable to take part. An emerging finding is a lack of understanding of inclusive design problems, which may lead to problem with inclusive design policy implementation, and thus adversely affect how the built environment can be experienced. There is a strong indication from the survey respondents indicating that they are most likely to learn about inclusive design from policy guides produced by their Local Authorities and from their colleagues.

Instrumentalidade do serviço social na previdência social no Brasil contemporâneo

In the sociability of the capital, the challenges to the consolidation of social security as a public policy become expressive, which has implications for social security services, particularly for Social Works who works for the security and fulfillment of social rights. Therefore, in this context of denial of these rights becomes relevant the work of social worker, as a professional committed to the ethical-political project and the Matrix Theory and Methodology of Social work, which potentiate the action able to establish professional articulated strategies for the strengthening of collective struggles for equality in society. Thus, this study examines the instrumentality of social work in the contemporary world and its contribution to the realization of rights. For this, we conducted a literature review, using authors dealing with the issue, as Behring (2008), Boschetti (2003), Mota (1995), Guerra (2007) among others, as well as documentary research through laws, decrees, instructions Normative, Internal Guidelines, and especially the analysis of the Matrix itself of Social Work in welfare. We use also of paramount importance to our analysis - the field research, using techniques such as semi-structured interview and questionnaire. The research enables the identification of important aspects of the subject studied, as the understanding of professionals about the instrumentality of Social Works in its ethical-political aspects, both theoretical and methodological and technicaloperative. The demands made by the managers for the profession on the sociooccupational have extrapolated the powers and duties of the Law Regulating the Profession and the Matrix of Social Work in welfare. The subjects of this study emphasize the role of social category of the National Institute of Social Security and the Federal Council of Social Service in defense of Social Works. The knowledge of social and institutional framework is critical to building control strategies that strengthen social security and public policy, the guarantor of social rights for workers in Brazil

Parameter-based mechanism for unifying user interaction, applications and communication protocols

In the smart building control industry, creating a platform to integrate different communication protocols and ease the interaction between users and devices is becoming increasingly important. BATMP is a platform designed to achieve this goal. In this paper, the authors describe a novel mechanism for information exchange, which introduces a new concept, Parameter, and uses it as the common object among all the BATMP components: Gateway Manager, Technology Manager, Application Manager, Model Manager and Data Warehouse. Parameter is an object which represents a physical magnitude and contains the information about its presentation, available actions, access type, etc. Each component of BATMP has a copy of the parameters. In the Technology Manager, three drivers for different communication protocols, KNX, CoAP and Modbus, are implemented to convert devices into parameters. In the Gateway Manager, users can control the parameters directly or by defining a scenario. In the Application Manager, the applications can subscribe to parameters and decide the values of parameters by negotiating. Finally, a Negotiator is implemented in the Model Manager to notify other components about the changes taking place in any component. By applying this mechanism, BATMP ensures the simultaneous and concurrent communication among users, applications and devices.