Artificial Decision Making Under Uncertainty in Intelligent Buildings

Our hypothesis is that by equipping certain agents in a multi-agent system controlling an intelligent building with automated decision support, two important factors will be in­ creased. The first is energy saving in the building. The second is customer value-how the people in the building experience the ef­ fects of the actions of the agents. We give evi­ dence for the truth of this hypothesis through experimental findings related to tools for arti­ ficial decision making. A number of assump­ tions related to agent control, through moni­ toring and delegation of tasks to other kinds of agents, of rooms at a test site are relaxed. Each assumption controls at least one un­ certainty that complicates considerably the procedures for selecting actions part of each such agent. We show that in realistic deci­ sion situations, room-controlling agents can make bounded rational decisions even under dynamic real-time constraints. This result can be, and has been, generalized to other domains with even harsher time constraints.