A Distributed Intelligent Building Agent Language (DIBAL)

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 rooms that communicate with each other via a network. Inter-agent communication is central to such multi-agent systems. In this paper we explain why existing agent communication languages (ACLs) are unsuitable for IB embedded-agents and present a specification for a hierarchical Distributed Intelligent Building Agent Langauge (DIBAL) that overcomes the problems in applying ACLs to IB based embedded-agents. The paper begins by reviewing existing Agent Communication Languages (ACL) and discussing their unsuitability for IB applications before preenting our IB embedded agent communition language, DIBAL. We then illustrate the ways in which DIBAL would facilitate the functionality we require by looking at a few IB scenarios in some detail.