A multi-agent system for intelligent pervasive spaces

2011

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.

Proceedings of the First International Conference on Ambient Media and Systems, 2008

Intelligent agents have often been used within intelligent buildings for autonomous actuation of heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems (HVAC) within intelligent buildings. Ubiquitous wireless sensors send environmental data such as temperature, which is then calculated by the agents in compliance to building policies and stakeholder requirements.

2009

Buildings are complex systems that provide the setting and conditions for many day-to-day critical commercial and industrial activities. Buildings aggregate and integrate HVAC and lighting system components from multiple manufacturers. These systems are subject to change over time, their controllers must respond to varying outdoor environments while maintaining specific indoor conditions. Technological advances over time also influence the composition and configuration of building systems. Buildings create technical challenges of providing individual comfort, organizational flexibility, technological adaptability, environmental sustainability, while at the same time minimizing energy consumption. With emerging trends of using large scale systems with broadly-distributed components in the built environment, a single interface interaction to change the temperature in a space can spawn many backend transactions among multiple nodes that offer specific services. For a flexible and redis...

2006

The goal of the MavHome (Managing An Intelligent Versa- tile Home) project is to create a home that acts as a rational agent. The agent seeks to maximize inhabitant comfort and minimize operation cost. In order to achieve these goals, the agent must be able to predict the mobility patterns and device usages of the inhabitants. Because of the size of the problem, controlling a smart environment can be effectively approached as a multi-agent task. Individual agents can address a portion of the problem but must coordinate their actions to accomplish the overall goals of the system. In this chapter, we discuss the application of multi-agent systems to the challenge of controlling a smart environment and describe its implementation in the MavHome project.

This paper presents a novel framework for multiagent coordination in smart buildings, towards the aim of energy management. The framework builds on top of an existing Service-Oriented middleware for Ambient Intelligence, which offers sensor and actuator functions of wireless devices. The middleware also provides a semantics infrastructure that assists in authoring agent policies for reducing energy consumption and maximizing user comfort. Each agent within the framework is responsible for monitoring the environmental context and controlling the electrical appliances of a specific room. However, the collective behavior of the multi-agent system is controlled by a Coordinator Agent that approves or rejects the allocation of building resources in time, aiming at more "long-term" goals that are out of the reach and scope of the individual Room Agents. The agents' underlying logic is expressed via Defeasible Logics, a formalism offering intuitive knowledge representation and advanced conflict resolution mechanisms.

fedcsis.eucip.pl

Future buildings will be smart to support personalized people comfort and building energy efficiency as well as safety, emergency, and context-aware information exchange scenarios. In this work we propose a decentralized and embedded architecture based on agents and wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) for enabling efficient and effective management of buildings. The main purpose of the agent-based architecture is to efficiently support distributed and coordinated sensing and actuation operations. The building management architecture is implemented in MAPS (Mobile Agent Platform for Sun SPOTs), an agent-based framework for programming WSN applications based on the Sun SPOT sensor platform. The proposed architecture is demonstrated in a simple yet effective operating scenario related to monitoring workstation usage in computer laboratories. The high modularity of the proposed architecture allows for easy adaptation of higher-level application-specific agents that can therefore exploit the architecture to implement intelligent building management policies.

ACM Computing Surveys, 2014

In recent years, reduction of energy consumption in buildings has increasingly gained interest among researchers mainly due to practical reasons, such as economic advantages and long-term environmental sustainability. Many solutions have been proposed in the literature to address this important issue from complementary perspectives, which are often hard to capture in a comprehensive manner. This survey article aims at providing a structured and unifying treatment of the existing literature on intelligent energy management systems in buildings, with a distinct focus on available architectures and methodology supporting a vision transcending the well-established smart home vision, in favor of the novel Ambient Intelligence paradigm. Our exposition will cover the main architectural components of such systems, beginning with the basic sensory infrastructure, moving on to the data processing engine where energy saving strategies may be enacted, to the user interaction interface subsystem, and finally to the actuation infrastructure necessary to transfer the planned modifications to the environment. For each component we will analyze di↵erent solutions, and we will provide qualitative comparisons, also highlighting the impact that a single design choice can have on the rest of the system.

The sixth International …, 2000

From the multi-agent system perspective Intelligent Buildings (IB) are a new research area and this domain poses several interesting challenges. Our IB model comprises a building containing room based embedded-agents which control environmental variables and devices within ...

Energy efficiency has nowadays become one of the most challenging task for both academic and commercial organizations, and this has boosted research on novel fields, such as Ambient Intelligence. In this paper we address the issue of timely and ubiquitous monitoring of building complexes in order to optimize their energy consumption, and present an intelligent system addressed to the typical end user, i.e. the administrator, or responsible operator, of the complex. A three-level architecture has been designed for detecting the presence of the building inhabitants user and understanding their preferences with respect to the environmental conditions in order to optimize the overall energy efficiency of the buildings. Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSAN) are used to remotely monitor and control the environment according to the decisions made by a centralized reasoner. A case study derived from an actual implementation of the system regarding the management of a university build...

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.