Jun-young Kwak

Towards Optimization of Building Energy and Occupant Comfort Using Multi-Agent Simulation

The primary consumers of building energy are heating, cooling, ventilation, and lighting systems, which maintain occupant comfort, and electronics and appliances that enable occupant functionality. The optimization of building energy is therefore a complex problem highly dependent on unique building and environmental conditions as well as on time dependent operational factors. To provide computational support for this optimization, this paper presents and implements a multi-agent comfort and energy simulation (MACES) to model alternative management and control of building systems and occupants. Human and device agents are used to explore current trends in energy consumption and management of a university test bed building. Reactive and predictive control strategies are then imposed on device agents in an attempt to reduce building energy consumption while maintaining occupant comfort. Finally, occupant agents are motivated by simulation feedback to accept more energy conscious scheduling through multi-agent negotiations. Initial results of the MACES demonstrate potential energy savings of 17% while maintaining a high level of occupant comfort. This work is intended to demonstrate a simulation tool, which is implementable in the actual test bed site and compatible with real-world input to instigate and motivate more energy conscious control and occupant behaviors.

Human-Building Interaction for Energy Conservation in Office Buildings

Buildings are one of the major consumers of energy in the U.S. Both commercial and residential buildings account for about 42% of the national U.S. energy consumption. The majority of commercial buildings energy consumption is attributed to lighting (25%), space heating and cooling (25%), and ventilation (7%). Several research studies and industrial developments have focused on energy management based on maximum occupancy. However, fewer studies, with the objective of energy savings, have considered human preferences. This research focuses on office buildings’ occupants’ preferences and their contribution to the building energy conservation. Accordingly, occupants of selected university campus offices were asked to reduce lighting levels in their offices during work hours. Different types of information regarding their energy consumption were provided to the occupants. Email messages were used to communicate with the occupants. To monitor behavioral changes during the study, the test bed offices were equipped with wireless light sensors. The deployed light sensors were capable of detecting variations in light intensity, which was correlated with energy consumption. The impact of different types of information on occupant’s energy related behavior is presented.

TESLA: an extended study of an energy-saving agent that leverages schedule flexibility

This paper presents transformative energy-saving schedule-leveraging agent (TESLA), an agent for optimizing energy usage in commercial buildings. TESLA’s key insight is that adding flexibility to event/meeting schedules can lead to significant energy savings. This paper provides four key contributions: (i) online scheduling algorithms, which are at the heart of TESLA, to solve a stochastic mixed integer linear program for energy-efficient scheduling of incrementally/dynamically arriving meetings and events; (ii) an algorithm to effectively identify key meetings that lead to significant energy savings by adjusting their flexibility; (iii) an extensive analysis on energy savings achieved by TESLA; and (iv) surveys of real users which indicate that TESLA’s assumptions of user flexibility hold in practice. TESLA was evaluated on data gathered from over 110,000 meetings held at nine campus buildings during an 8-month period in 2011–2012 at the University of Southern California and Singapore Management University. These results and analysis show that, compared to the current systems, TESLA can substantially reduce overall energy consumption.

Predicting HVAC Energy Consumption in Commercial Buildings Using Multiagent Systems

Energy consumption in commercial buildings has been increasing rapidly in the past decade. The knowledge of future energy consumption can bring significant value to commercial building energy management. For example, prediction of energy consumption decomposition helps analyze the energy consumption patterns and efficiencies as well as waste, and identify the prime targets for energy conservation. Moreover, prediction of temporal energy consumption enables building managers to plan out the energy usage over time, shift energy usage to off-peak periods, and make more effective energy purchase plans. This paper proposes a novel model for predicting heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) energy consumption in commercial buildings. The model simulates energy behaviors of HVAC systems in commercial buildings, and interacts with a multiagent systems (MAS) based framework for energy consumption prediction. Prediction is done on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Ground truth energy consumption data is collected from a test bed office building over 267 consecutive days, and is compared to predicted energy consumption for the same period. Results show that the prediction can match 92.6 to 98.2% of total HVAC energy consumption with coefficient of variation of the root mean square error (CV-RMSE) values of 7.8 to 22.2%. Ventilation energy consumption can be predicted at high accuracies (over 99%) and low variations (CV-RMSE values of 3.1 to 16.3%), while cooling energy consumption accounts for majority of inaccuracies and variations in total energy consumption prediction.

Two decades of multiagent teamwork research: past, present, and future

This paper discusses some of the recent cooperative multiagent systems work in the TEAMCORE lab at the University of Southern California. Based in part on an invited talk at the CARE 2010 workshop, we highlight how and why execution-time reasoning has been supplementing, or replacing, planning-time reasoning in such systems.

Game theory and human behavior: challenges in security and sustainability

Security and sustainability are two critical global challenges that involve the interaction of many intelligent actors. Game theory provides a sound mathematical framework to model such interactions, and computational game theory in particular has a promising role to play in helping to address key aspects of these challenges. Indeed, in the domain of security, we have already taken some encouraging steps by successfully applying game-theoretic algorithms to real-world security problems: our algorithms are in use by agencies such as the US coast guard, the Federal Air Marshals Service, the LAX police and the Transportation Security Administration. While these applications of game-theoretic algorithms have advanced the state of the art, this paper lays out some key challenges as we continue to expand the use of these algorithms in real-world domains. One such challenge in particular is that classical game theory makes a set of assumptions of the players, which may not be consistent with real-world scenarios, especially when humans are involved. To actually model human behavior within game-theoretic framework, it is important to address the new challenges that arise due to the presence of human players: (i) human bounded rationality; (ii) limited observations and imperfect strategy execution; (iii) large action spaces. We present initial solutions to these challenges in context of security games. For sustainability, we lay out our initial efforts and plans, and key challenges related to human behavior in the loop.

Towards a Robust MultiAgent Autonomous Reasoning System (MAARS): An Initial Simulation Study for Satellite Defense

Multi-agent autonomous reasoning systems have emerged as a promising planning technique for addressing satellite defense problems. The main challenge is to extend and scale up the capabilities of current and emerging reasoning and planning methods to handle the characteristics of the satellite defense problem. This paper focuses on some key critical research issues that need to be addressed in order to perform automated planning and execution fitted to the specific nature of response to ASAT attacks, and provides MAARS, a new autonomous reasoning framework for satellite defense. As the core of MAARS, we present MODERN, a new execution-centric method for DEC-POMDPs explicitly motivated by model uncertainty. There are two key innovative features in MODERN: (i) it maintains an exponentially smaller model of other agents’ beliefs and actions than in previous work and then further reduces the computation-time and space expense of this model via bounded pruning; and (ii) it reduces execution-time computation by exploiting BDI theories of teamwork, and limits communication reasoning to key trigger points. We demonstrate a proof of concept of MAARS in the simplified ASAT mitigation scenario. We then show initial evaluation results of MAARS in ASAT domains that are critical in advancing the state-of-the-art in providing autonomous reasoning to delve into unperceived models as well as deal with exponential explosion of the computational complexity of current algorithms.