Energy performance forecasting of residential buildings using fuzzy approaches

The energy consumption used for domestic purposes in Europe is, to a considerable extent, due to heating and cooling. This energy is produced mostly by burning fossil fuels, which has a high negative environmental impact. The characteristics of a building are an important factor to determine the necessities of heating and cooling loads. Therefore, the study of the relevant characteristics of the buildings, regarding the heating and cooling needed to maintain comfortable indoor air conditions, could be very useful in order to design and construct energy-efficient buildings. In previous studies, different machine-learning approaches have been used to predict heating and cooling loads from the set of variables: relative compactness, surface area, wall area, roof area, overall height, orientation, glazing area and glazing area distribution. However, none of these methods are based on fuzzy logic. In this research, we study two fuzzy logic approaches, i.e., fuzzy inductive reasoning (FIR) and adaptive neuro fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), to deal with the same problem. Fuzzy approaches obtain very good results, outperforming all the methods described in previous studies except one. In this work, we also study the feature selection process of FIR methodology as a pre-processing tool to select the more relevant variables before the use of any predictive modelling methodology. It is proven that FIR feature selection provides interesting insights into the main building variables causally related to heating and cooling loads. This allows better decision making and design strategies, since accurate cooling and heating load estimations and correct identification of parameters that affect building energy demands are of high importance to optimize building designs and equipment specifications.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Laparoscopy Pneumoperitoneum Fuzzy Modeling

Abstract: Gas volume to intra-peritoneal pressure fuzzy modeling for evaluating pneumoperitoneum in videolaparoscopic surgery is proposed in this paper. The proposed approach innovates in using fuzzy logic and fuzzy set theory for evaluating the accuracy of the prognosis value in order to minimize or avoid iatrogenic injuries due to the blind needle puncture. In so doing, it demonstrates the feasibility of fuzzy analysis to contribute to medicine and health care. Fuzzy systems is employed here in synergy with artificial neural network based on backpropaga tion, multilayer perceptron architecture for building up numerical functions. Experimental data employed for analysis were collected in the accomplishment of the pneumoperitoneum in a random population of patients submitted to videolaparoscopic surgeries. Numerical results indicate that the proposed fuzzy mapping for describing the relation from the intra peritoneal pressure measures as function injected gas volumes succeeded in determinining a fuzzy model for this nonlinear system when compared to the statistical model

AI and OR in management of operations: history and trends

The last decade has seen a considerable growth in the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for operations management with the aim of finding solutions to problems that are increasing in complexity and scale. This paper begins by setting the context for the survey through a historical perspective of OR and AI. An extensive survey of applications of AI techniques for operations management, covering a total of over 1200 papers published from 1995 to 2004 is then presented. The survey utilizes Elsevier's ScienceDirect database as a source. Hence, the survey may not cover all the relevant journals but includes a sufficiently wide range of publications to make it representative of the research in the field. The papers are categorized into four areas of operations management: (a) design, (b) scheduling, (c) process planning and control and (d) quality, maintenance and fault diagnosis. Each of the four areas is categorized in terms of the AI techniques used: genetic algorithms, case-based reasoning, knowledge-based systems, fuzzy logic and hybrid techniques. The trends over the last decade are identified, discussed with respect to expected trends and directions for future work suggested

Neural Networks Architecture Evaluation in a Quantum Computer

In this work, we propose a quantum algorithm to evaluate neural networks architectures named Quantum Neural Network Architecture Evaluation (QNNAE). The proposed algorithm is based on a quantum associative memory and the learning algorithm for artificial neural networks. Unlike conventional algorithms for evaluating neural network architectures, QNNAE does not depend on initialization of weights. The proposed algorithm has a binary output and results in 0 with probability proportional to the performance of the network. And its computational cost is equal to the computational cost to train a neural network