The application of intelligent agency in a software model for buildings

This paper outlines the formulation of a state of the art intelligent multi agent society that exploits, through semantic enhancement, the data available in an existing digital building model (DBM) software architecture (see (Dibley et al., 2009)). Collectively the agents combine a range of specialist ontologies scoped to sub domains to realise individual and collective skills. Each ontology uses an appropriate knowledge representation to maximise simplicity while retaining adequate expressivity. A shared upper ontology is employed to support general communication and to provide ‘common sense’ knowledge. The agents in general are characterised by the strong notion of agency (as described in the literature), using the BDI (belief, desire, intention) model of agency as a powerful abstraction tool that is suited to applications where the complexity of systems and processes cannot be fully modelled using conventional techniques. The goals of the agents are, typically, to maximize some defined utility, and resulting behaviours are individual and collaborative, aligned and opposed. Knowledge retained, evolved and utilised by agents needs only to be generally locally consistent, and collectively the system can contain redundancy. The BDI model hasn’t yet been exploited in construction industry applications; most existing work employs task/plan rather than goal focussed deliberative agents.