Development of multi-agent system for building energy and comfort management based on occupant behaviors

Energy and comfort management is the major task for a building automation system. As a trend of next-generation's commercial buildings, intelligent buildings are capable of facilitating intelligent control of the building to fulfill occupants’ needs. Since occupants’ behaviors have a direct impact on the system performance, the building should be able to interact with occupants by responding to their requests and obtaining feedbacks based on their behaviors. In this paper, a multi-agent based intelligent control system is developed for achieving effective energy and comfort management in a building environment. The developed multi-agent system turns out to be capable of facilitating the building to interact with its occupants for realizing user-centered control of buildings.

► A multi-agent system is developed to manage the indoor environment, including temperature, illumination, and air quality. ► A personal agent is designed to enable the interactions between the occupants and the environment. ► The energy efficiency and users’ comfort are optimized through the proposed control system. ► The system features an open architecture so that it can be adapted to different building types.