The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) wants to study how artificial intelligence agents  – cousins to search spiders and machine learning routines for robotics – can be deployed in the operation of HVAC equipment and in improving building energy and comfort performance overall.  Such building ‘bots are becoming just one more level of data exchange in a building — another level that needs to be integrated with BACnet streams, Ethernet  TCP/IP -XML communications, Wi-Fi and wireless protocol data, etc.   

“Adapting intelligent agent technologies from other fields offers the promise of significant improvements in building operations,” explains Amanda Pertzborn, a mechanical engineer working in NIST’s Embedded Intelligence in Buildings Program. “The idea is a kind of ‘one for all approach’—use networked intelligent agents to manage and control devices and equipment subsystems to enhance the overall performance of a building rather than to optimize the operation of each component independently of all the others.”

Intelligent agents are combinations of software and hardware—sensors, mechanical devices and computing technologies—that perceive their environment, make decisions and take actions in response. They can monitor, communicate, collaborate and even learn, predict and adapt. Read the NIST story here.