3 research outputs found
Platform-Based Business Models: Insights from an Emerging Ai-Enabled Smart Building Ecosystem
Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging to become a highly potential enabling technology for smart buildings. However, the development of AI applications quite often follows a traditional, closed, and product-oriented approach. This study aims to introduce the platform model and ecosystem thinking to the development of AI-enabled smart buildings. The study identifies the needs for a user-oriented digital service ecosystem and business model in the smart building sector in Finland, which aimed to facilitate the launch of scalable businesses and an experiential and dynamic business ecosystem. A multi-method, interpretive case study was applied in the focal ecosystem, with the leading real estate and facility management operators in Northern Europe as part of a Finnish national innovation project. Our results propose an extended comprehensive framework of the 5C ecosystemic model (Connection, Content, Computation, Context, and Commerce) and the possible paths of ecosystem players in the domain of smart building and smart built environment, both theoretically and empirically. The platform-oriented business models are missing, yet desired, by the ecosystem actors. The value chain and ecosystem platforms imply the quest for new (platform) models. Finally, our research discusses the need for new value-chain- and ecosystem-oriented AI development and big data platforms in the future.Keywords: smart building; artificial intelligence; platform; ecosystem; business model</div
An Embedded Platform for Testbed Implementation of Multi-Agent System in Building Energy Management System
This paper presents a hardware testbed for testing the building energy management
system (BEMS) based-on the multi agent system (MAS). The objective of BEMS is to maximize user
comfort while minimizing the energy extracted from the grid. The proposed system implements a
multi-objective optimization technique using a genetic algorithm (GA) and the fuzzy logic controller
(FLC) to control the room temperature and illumination setpoints. The agents are implemented on the
low cost embedded systems equipped with the WiFi communication for communicating between the
agents. The photovoltaic (PV)-battery system, the air conditioning system, the lighting system, and the
electrical loads are modeled and simulated on the embedded hardware. The popular communication
protocols such as Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and Modbus TCP/IP are adopted
for integrating the proposed MAS with the existing infrastructures and devices. The experimental
results show that the sampling time of the proposed system is 16.50 s. Therefore it is suitable for
implementing the BEMS in a real-time where the data are updated in an hourly or minutely basis.
Further, the proposed optimization technique shows better results in optimizing the comfort index
and the energy extracted from the grid compared to the existing methods.
Keywords: BEMS; MAS; embedded system; multi-objective optimization; genetic algorith