A Multi-Agent System for Building Control

Energy efficiency and occupants' comfort are two important factors for evaluating the performance of a modern work environment. While energy efficiency, pivotal to energy savings, has been improving steadily over the past decades, a great effort has been made to address occupants' comfort, pivotal to work productivity, too. Not surprisingly, many researchers have endeavored to combine the expertise from the two areas to create an intelligent work environment, where energy efficiency is achieved without compromising occupants' comfort. Previous studies provide insightful discussions and exciting experiments. Most of them, however, stopped short of commercialization and adoption in daily life due to the limitations of hardware and software technologies at the time. With the advance of agent technology, wireless sensor network and open standards in building automation/management systems, it is now feasible to build such an intelligent system for energy efficient and occupants satisfied building control, as envisaged and explored by those pioneers. This paper introduces some ongoing research on developing a multi-agent system that combines an EDA agent model, personalized space, policy management, building performance quotient, wireless sensor network, and building automation/management system to provide an intelligent work environment.