Research Overview

The research aims at developing an energy-aware, cyber-physical multi agent framework of buildings, humans, and intelligent software agents for sustainable energy management, taking a collective, energy literacy approach to influencing building occupants, operators, designers, and engineers. We aim to improve energy literacy “downstream” in the arena of building operations, as well as “upstream” in the arena of building design and engineering. The downstream loop reduces energy consumption by influencing the behavior of building occupants and building systems. Early-stage design decisions can be critical, with lifecycle-long impacts on a building’s energy footprint. The upstream loop permits our system’s findings to inform the design process in the future, so that choices considered by building designers, and engineers can be evaluated based on their implications for occupant behavior and hence energy consumption.

The project assesses behavior of building occupants, evaluates building design/system specifications, and identifies building operational policies, facilitated by a multi-agent model. Based on this integrated model, feedback about occupant energy use to building designers is provided to shape early-stage design decisions that have the longest lasting impact on building's lifecycle footprint. The central focus is designing a multi-component model of energy consumption in office buildings in order to identify and test the optimal points of change in energy systems. Specifically, the research predicts that energy use could be optimized in an integrated way by changing occupant behavior, design/system specifications, and building operators' policies via an agent-based system.