8,172 research outputs found
A Review on the Application of Natural Computing in Environmental Informatics
Natural computing offers new opportunities to understand, model and analyze
the complexity of the physical and human-created environment. This paper
examines the application of natural computing in environmental informatics, by
investigating related work in this research field. Various nature-inspired
techniques are presented, which have been employed to solve different relevant
problems. Advantages and disadvantages of these techniques are discussed,
together with analysis of how natural computing is generally used in
environmental research.Comment: Proc. of EnviroInfo 201
Challenges in Complex Systems Science
FuturICT foundations are social science, complex systems science, and ICT.
The main concerns and challenges in the science of complex systems in the
context of FuturICT are laid out in this paper with special emphasis on the
Complex Systems route to Social Sciences. This include complex systems having:
many heterogeneous interacting parts; multiple scales; complicated transition
laws; unexpected or unpredicted emergence; sensitive dependence on initial
conditions; path-dependent dynamics; networked hierarchical connectivities;
interaction of autonomous agents; self-organisation; non-equilibrium dynamics;
combinatorial explosion; adaptivity to changing environments; co-evolving
subsystems; ill-defined boundaries; and multilevel dynamics. In this context,
science is seen as the process of abstracting the dynamics of systems from
data. This presents many challenges including: data gathering by large-scale
experiment, participatory sensing and social computation, managing huge
distributed dynamic and heterogeneous databases; moving from data to dynamical
models, going beyond correlations to cause-effect relationships, understanding
the relationship between simple and comprehensive models with appropriate
choices of variables, ensemble modeling and data assimilation, modeling systems
of systems of systems with many levels between micro and macro; and formulating
new approaches to prediction, forecasting, and risk, especially in systems that
can reflect on and change their behaviour in response to predictions, and
systems whose apparently predictable behaviour is disrupted by apparently
unpredictable rare or extreme events. These challenges are part of the FuturICT
agenda
A Review on Energy Consumption Optimization Techniques in IoT Based Smart Building Environments
In recent years, due to the unnecessary wastage of electrical energy in
residential buildings, the requirement of energy optimization and user comfort
has gained vital importance. In the literature, various techniques have been
proposed addressing the energy optimization problem. The goal of each technique
was to maintain a balance between user comfort and energy requirements such
that the user can achieve the desired comfort level with the minimum amount of
energy consumption. Researchers have addressed the issue with the help of
different optimization algorithms and variations in the parameters to reduce
energy consumption. To the best of our knowledge, this problem is not solved
yet due to its challenging nature. The gap in the literature is due to the
advancements in the technology and drawbacks of the optimization algorithms and
the introduction of different new optimization algorithms. Further, many newly
proposed optimization algorithms which have produced better accuracy on the
benchmark instances but have not been applied yet for the optimization of
energy consumption in smart homes. In this paper, we have carried out a
detailed literature review of the techniques used for the optimization of
energy consumption and scheduling in smart homes. The detailed discussion has
been carried out on different factors contributing towards thermal comfort,
visual comfort, and air quality comfort. We have also reviewed the fog and edge
computing techniques used in smart homes
From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design
As the recent financial crisis showed, today there is a strong need to gain
"ecological perspective" of all relevant interactions in
socio-economic-techno-environmental systems. For this, we suggested to set-up a
network of Centers for integrative systems design, which shall be able to run
all potentially relevant scenarios, identify causality chains, explore feedback
and cascading effects for a number of model variants, and determine the
reliability of their implications (given the validity of the underlying
models). They will be able to detect possible negative side effect of policy
decisions, before they occur. The Centers belonging to this network of
Integrative Systems Design Centers would be focused on a particular field, but
they would be part of an attempt to eventually cover all relevant areas of
society and economy and integrate them within a "Living Earth Simulator". The
results of all research activities of such Centers would be turned into
informative input for political Decision Arenas. For example, Crisis
Observatories (for financial instabilities, shortages of resources,
environmental change, conflict, spreading of diseases, etc.) would be connected
with such Decision Arenas for the purpose of visualization, in order to make
complex interdependencies understandable to scientists, decision-makers, and
the general public.Comment: 34 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c
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