An agent-based simulation-assisted approach to bi-lateral building systems control

Two of the primary objectives of building operations are maximizing occupancy comfort and minimizing energy costs. While research effort has been focused on concept development, design decision support and systems advancement, little attention has been paid to operational decision support. Most commercial buildings are operated under a central control scheme, in which a building operator makes control decisions without in-depth information about individual preference. Widely used set points represent generalized human requirements that do not sufficiently address individual differences. Energy costs, on the other hand, are easier to measure. As a result, operational decisions tend to favor cost savings at the expense of individual occupancy comfort.; Personal control systems have enabled individual occupants to customize their local environments. It is argued that individual occupants and building operators have different motivations for environmental controls. They access to different scopes of information and represent partial knowledge for operational solutions. Such a new control environment suggests a bi-lateral control scheme that cannot be offered by existing central control schemes or distributed control schemes. There is a critical need for methods that support the bi-lateral control scheme, in which building operators and individual occupants coordinate to make balanced control decisions. Toward this end, an agent-based simulation-assisted computational framework has been proposed and prototypically implemented in the lighting controls domain. The prototype supports bi-lateral building operations by offering concurrent evaluation of alternative control strategies. The experimental results showed that, by utilizing the proposed framework, the energy use is greatly reduced without undue increase in individual visual discomfort.