Realization of the Cognitive Architecture LIDA in the Building Automation Domain

In the building automation domain the maximum comfort wants to be achieved; however energy efficiency has to be maximized, and both of them cannot be optimized at the same time. Cognitive agents allow solving multi-goal problems like this, having a background motivation acting in order to fulfill its given goal. A building automation agent that controls an air conditioning system will act according to these two goals and take the proper decisions to obtain the desired conditions. Even though there are several cognitive architectures, there is not yet a framework for a building automation cognitive agent. In this thesis, the LIDA architecture will be tested in a building automation problem in order to say whether it is viable for this purpose. Here, it is shown a basic implementation of a LIDA-based cognitive agent in a building automation problem. Some experiments have been made to show the results on different scenarios and prove the viability of LIDA in the building automation domain. It is also shown that some of the characteristics of LIDA complement well with the building automation problems. With these results a more complicated cognitive agent could be developed in the building automation domain. Despite existing other cognitive architectures that could be as viable as LIDA or even more, the good performance of it motivate the development of a more sophisticated software to show an actual implementation of LIDA in building automation

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Knowledge-based System to Support Architectural Design. Intelligent objects, project net-constraints, collaborative work

The architectural design business is marked by a progressive increase in operators all cooperating towards the realization of building structures and complex infrastructures (Jenckes, 1997). This type of design implies the simulta-neous activity of specialists in different fields, often working a considerable dis-tance apart, on increasingly distributed design studies. Collaborative Architectural Design comprises a vast field of studies that em-braces also these sectors and problems. To mention but a few: communication among operators in the building and design sector; design process system logic architecture; conceptual structure of the building organism; building component representation; conflict identification and management; sharing of knowledge; and also, user interface; global evaluation of solutions adopted; IT definition of objects; inter-object communication (in the IT sense). The point of view of the research is that of the designers of the architectural arte-fact (Simon, 1996); its focus consists of the relations among the various design operators and among the latter and the information exchanged: the Building Objects. Its primary research goal is thus the conceptual structure of the building organ-ism for the purpose of managing conflicts and developing possible methods of resolving them

Tasks, cognitive agents, and KB-DSS in workflow and process management

The purpose of this paper is to propose a nonparametric interest rate term structure model and investigate its implications on term structure dynamics and prices of interest rate derivative securities. The nonparametric spot interest rate process is estimated from the observed short-term interest rates following a robust estimation procedure and the market price of interest rate risk is estimated as implied from the historical term structure data. That is, instead of imposing a priori restrictions on the model, data are allowed to speak for themselves, and at the same time the model retains a parsimonious structure and the computational tractability. The model is implemented using historical Canadian interest rate term structure data. The parametric models with closed form solutions for bond and bond option prices, namely the Vasicek (1977) and CIR (1985) models, are also estimated for comparison purpose. The empirical results not only provide strong evidence that the traditional spot interest rate models and market prices of interest rate risk are severely misspecified but also suggest that different model specifications have significant impact on term structure dynamics and prices of interest rate derivative securities.

Cognitive barriers during monitoring-based commissioning of buildings

Monitoring-based commissioning (MBCx) is a continuous building energy management process used to optimize energy performance in buildings. Although monitoring-based commissioning (MBCx) can reduce energy waste by up to 20%, many buildings still underperform due to issues such as unnoticed system faults and inefficient operational procedures. While there are technical barriers that impede the MBCx process, such as data quality, the focuses of this paper are the non-technical, behavioral and organizational, barriers that contribute to issues initiating and implementing MBCx. In particular, this paper discusses cognitive biases, which can lead to suboptimal outcomes in energy efficiency decisions, resulting in missed opportunities for energy savings. This paper provides evidence of cognitive biases in decisions during the MBCx process using qualitative data from over 40 public and private sector organizations. The results describe barriers resulting from cognitive biases, listed in descending order of occurrence, including: risk aversion, social norms, choice overload, status quo bias, information overload, professional bias, and temporal discounting. Building practitioners can use these results to better understand potential cognitive biases, in turn allowing them to establish best practices and make more informed decisions. Researchers can use these results to empirically test specific decision interventions and facilitate more energy efficient decisions