A normative approach to multi-agent systems for intelligent buildings

Building Management Systems (BMS) are widely adopted in modern buildings around the world in order to provide high-quality building services, and reduce the running cost of the building. However, most BMS are functionality-oriented and do not consider user personalization. The aim of this research is to capture and represent building management rules using organizational semiotics methods. We implement Semantic Analysis, which determines semantic units in building management and their relationship patterns of behaviour, and Norm Analysis, which extracts and specifies the norms that establish how and when these management actions occur. Finally, we propose a multi-agent framework for norm based building management. This framework contributes to the design domain of intelligent building management system by defining a set of behaviour patterns, and the norms that govern the real-time behaviour in a building

Quench dynamics in the one-dimensional mass-imbalanced ionic Hubbard model

Using the time-dependent Lanczos method, we study the non-equilibrium dynamics of the one-dimensional ionic-mass imbalanced Hubbard chain driven by a quantum quench of the on-site Coulomb interaction, where the system is prepared in the ground state of the Hamiltonian with a different Hubbard interaction. A full exact diagonalization is adopted to study the zero temperature phase diagram in equilibrium, which is shown to be in good agreement with previous studies using density matrix renormalization group (DMRG). We then study the non-equilibrium quench dynamics of the spin and charge order parameters by fixing the initial and final Coulomb interaction while changing the quenching time protocols. The Lanczos method allows us to reach longer times following the quench than DMRG. Our study shows that the time evolution of the charge and spin order parameters strongly depend on the quenching time protocols. In particular, the effective temperature of the system will decrease monotonically as the quenching time is increased. Finally, by taking the final Coulomb interaction strength to be in the strong coupling regime, we find that the oscillation frequency of the charge order parameter increases monotonically with the Coulomb interaction. By contrast, the frequency of the spin order parameter decreases monotonically with increasing Coulomb interaction. We explain this result using an effective spin model in the strong coupling limit. Our study suggests strategies to engineer the relaxation behavior of interacting quantum many-particle systems.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure