A Brief Research Proposal on Intelligent Building Systems

A Brief Research Proposal on Intelligent Building Systems
Background
Intelligent building (IB) systems are interactive and context-aware systems embedded in buildings that provide people quality environment for living and working. The IB systems can make buildings environmental and energy efficiency as well.
The purpose of IB systems is to control, monitor and optimize building services, e.g., lighting, heating, ventilation, filtration, access control, alarm system, CCTV system and energy management.
The IB system is formed by smart devices surrounded inhabitants like a smart environment. The smart environment interacts with inhabitants and other information sources (temperature sensors, light sensors, data bases, etc.) in order to provide the inhabitants quality and appropriate services. It functions according to the different factors such as when, where, who, what. It can also study the pattern behaviors of the inhabitants and make its services better and better.
The main difficulties of current research on IB are:
1. How to capture and represent information from the inhabitants and other information sources?(pattern recognition and knowledge representation/data representation issues)
2. How to convert the captured information to control signals?(cybernetics and automation issues)
3. What are appropriate strategies of accumulating the knowledge from inhabitants and other information sources? (machine learning issues)
4. What is appropriate way to optimizing strategies of services by accumulating knowledge? (parameter optimization issues)

Objectives
The objectives of my proposed research are as following:

1. To analysis an IB system.
2. To research in the theories of the intelligent building system
3. To build a general model of IB.
4. To product an example IB system.

Technical Approach
The IB system is a subject in the fields of informatics and system engineering. Moreover, it involves a variety of subjects in computer science, some of them are listed here:
• Wireless communication, Computer Networking, context-aware computing,
• Algorithm design, Signal Prediction & Classification, Information theory,
• Multilayered Software Architecture, Corba, middleware
• Speech recognition
• Image processing, Image recognition
• Sensors design, calibration, Motion detection, temperature, pressure sensors, accelerometers
• Adaptive control, Kalman filters
• Agents
• Parallel processing
• Operating Systems



Zhuotao Huang
12th November 2007