Advanced Building Simulation

Chapter 7
Self-organizing models for
sentient buildings
Ardeshir Mahdavi
7.1 Introduction
7.1.1 Motivation
Buildings must respond to a growing set of requirements. Specifically, an increasing
number of environmental control systems must be made to operate in a manner that
is energy-effective, environmentally sustainable, economically feasible, and occupationally
desirable. To meet these challenges, efforts are needed to improve and augment
traditional methods of building control. This chapter specifically presents one
such effort, namely the work on the incorporation of simulation capabilities in the
methodological repertoire of building control systems.
7.1.2 Design and operation
The use of performance simulation tools and methods for building design support has
a long tradition. The potential of performance simulation for building control
support is, however, less explored. We do not mean here the use of simulation
for computational evaluation and fine-tuning of building control systems designs.
We mean the actual (real-time) support of the building controls using simulation
technology (Mahdavi 1997a,b, 2001a; Mahdavi et al. 1999a, 2000).
7.1.3 Conventional versus simulation-based control
Conventional control strategies may be broadly said to be “reactive”. A thermostat
is a classical example: The state of a control device (e.g. a heating system) is changed
incrementally in reaction to the measured value of a control parameter (e.g. the room
temperature). Simulation-based strategies may be broadly characterized as “proactive”.
In this case, a change in the state of a control device is decided based on the consideration
of a number of candidate control options and the comparative evaluation of
the simulated outcomes of these options.
7.1.4 Sentient buildings and self-organizing models
In this contribution we approach the simulation-based building control strategy
within the broader concept of “sentient” (self-aware) buildings (Mahdavi 2001b,c;