Artificial intelligence for energy conservation in buildings

Abstract

The problem of energy conservation in buildings is a multidimensional one. Researchers from a variety of disciplines have been working on this problem. It remains a challenging and yet rewarding study. In the past three decades, a plethora of scientific and technological publications on energy conservation in buildings have been presented in international journals. In this work, we discuss the potentiality of artificial intelligence (AI) as a design tool in building an automation system. The application of contemporary AI techniques creates intelligent buildings with the following main goals: energy efficiency, comfort, health and productivity in living spaces. Two modern domains of AI that are widely used in buildings are computational intelligence (CI) or soft computing and distributed artificial intelligence (DAI). DAI includes intelligent agents (IAs), multi-agent systems (MASs) and ambient intelligence. However, there is a lack of systematic review of research efforts and achievements mainly on IA and MAS domains. This chapter briefly presents expert systems and CI techniques and outlines how they operate. The major objective of this chapter is to illustrate how IAs and MASs may play an important role in conserving energy in buildings.