Cyber-Physical Systems for Smart Water Networks: A Review

There is a growing demand to equip Smart Water Networks (SWN) with advanced sensing and computation capabilities in order to detect anomalies and apply autonomous event-triggered control. Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) have emerged as an important research area capable of intelligently sensing the state of SWN and reacting autonomously in scenarios of unexpected crisis development. Through computational algorithms, CPSs can integrate physical components of SWN, such as sensors and actuators, and provide technological frameworks for data analytics, pertinent decision making, and control. The development of CPSs in SWN requires the collaboration of diverse scientific disciplines such as civil, hydraulics, electronics, environment, computer science, optimization, communication, and control theory. For efficient and successful deployment of CPS in SWN, there is a need for a common methodology in terms of design approaches that can involve various scientific disciplines. This paper reviews the state of the art, challenges, and opportunities for CPSs, that could be explored to design the intelligent sensing, communication, and control capabilities of CPS for SWN. In addition, we look at the challenges and solutions in developing a computational framework from the perspectives of machine learning, optimization, and control theory for SWN.acceptedVersio

State-of-the-art on research and applications of machine learning in the building life cycle

Fueled by big data, powerful and affordable computing resources, and advanced algorithms, machine learning has been explored and applied to buildings research for the past decades and has demonstrated its potential to enhance building performance. This study systematically surveyed how machine learning has been applied at different stages of building life cycle. By conducting a literature search on the Web of Knowledge platform, we found 9579 papers in this field and selected 153 papers for an in-depth review. The number of published papers is increasing year by year, with a focus on building design, operation, and control. However, no study was found using machine learning in building commissioning. There are successful pilot studies on fault detection and diagnosis of HVAC equipment and systems, load prediction, energy baseline estimate, load shape clustering, occupancy prediction, and learning occupant behaviors and energy use patterns. None of the existing studies were adopted broadly by the building industry, due to common challenges including (1) lack of large scale labeled data to train and validate the model, (2) lack of model transferability, which limits a model trained with one data-rich building to be used in another building with limited data, (3) lack of strong justification of costs and benefits of deploying machine learning, and (4) the performance might not be reliable and robust for the stated goals, as the method might work for some buildings but could not be generalized to others. Findings from the study can inform future machine learning research to improve occupant comfort, energy efficiency, demand flexibility, and resilience of buildings, as well as to inspire young researchers in the field to explore multidisciplinary approaches that integrate building science, computing science, data science, and social science

DEVELOPMENT OF FORECASTING AND SCHEDULING METHODS AND DATA ANALYTICS BASED CONTROLS FOR SMART LOADS IN RESIDENTIAL BUILDINGS.

DEVELOPMENT OF FORECASTING AND SCHEDULING METHODS AND DATA ANALYTICS BASED CONTROLS FOR SMART LOADS IN RESIDENTIAL BUILDINGS

Developing Leading and Lagging Indicators to Enhance Equipment Reliability in a Lean System

With increasing complexity in equipment, the failure rates are becoming a critical metric due to the unplanned maintenance in a production environment. Unplanned maintenance in manufacturing process is created issues with downtimes and decreasing the reliability of equipment. Failures in equipment have resulted in the loss of revenue to organizations encouraging maintenance practitioners to analyze ways to change unplanned to planned maintenance. Efficient failure prediction models are being developed to learn about the failures in advance. With this information, failures predicted can reduce the downtimes in the system and improve the throughput. The goal of this thesis is to predict failure in centrifugal pumps using various machine learning models like random forest, stochastic gradient boosting, and extreme gradient boosting. For accurate prediction, historical sensor measurements were modified into leading and lagging indicators which explained the failure patterns in the equipment were developed. The best subset of indicators was selected by filtering using random forest and utilized in the developed model. Finally, the models give a probability of failure before the failure occurs. Appropriate evaluation metrics were used to obtain the accurate model. The proposed methodology was illustrated with two case studies: first, to the centrifugal pump asset performance data provided by Meridium, Inc. and second, the data collected from aircraft turbine engine provided in the NASA prognostics data repository. The automated methodology was shown to develop and identify appropriate failure leading and lagging indicators in both cases and facilitate machine learning model development

A novel improved model for building energy consumption prediction based on model integration

Building energy consumption prediction plays an irreplaceable role in energy planning, management, and conservation. Constantly improving the performance of prediction models is the key to ensuring the efficient operation of energy systems. Moreover, accuracy is no longer the only factor in revealing model performance, it is more important to evaluate the model from multiple perspectives, considering the characteristics of engineering applications. Based on the idea of model integration, this paper proposes a novel improved integration model (stacking model) that can be used to forecast building energy consumption. The stacking model combines advantages of various base prediction algorithms and forms them into “meta-features” to ensure that the final model can observe datasets from different spatial and structural angles. Two cases are used to demonstrate practical engineering applications of the stacking model. A comparative analysis is performed to evaluate the prediction performance of the stacking model in contrast with existing well-known prediction models including Random Forest, Gradient Boosted Decision Tree, Extreme Gradient Boosting, Support Vector Machine, and K-Nearest Neighbor. The results indicate that the stacking method achieves better performance than other models, regarding accuracy (improvement of 9.5%–31.6% for Case A and 16.2%–49.4% for Case B), generalization (improvement of 6.7%–29.5% for Case A and 7.1%-34.6% for Case B), and robustness (improvement of 1.5%–34.1% for Case A and 1.8%–19.3% for Case B). The proposed model enriches the diversity of algorithm libraries of empirical models