An intelligent system for facility management

A software system has been developed that monitors and interprets temporally changing (internal) building environments and generates related knowledge that can assist in facility management (FM) decision making. The use of the multi agent paradigm facilitates a system that delivers demonstrable rationality and is robust within the dynamic environment that it operates. Agent behaviour directed at working toward goals is rendered intelligent with semantic web technologies. The capture of semantics through formal expression to model the environment, adds a richness that the agents exploit to intelligently determine behaviours to satisfy goals that are flexible and adaptable. The agent goals are to generate knowledge about building space usage as well as environmental conditions by elaborating and combining near real time sensor data and information from conventional building models. Additionally, further inferences are facilitated including those about wasted resources such as unnecessary lighting and heating. In contrast, current FM tools, lacking automatic synchronisation with the domain and rich semantic modelling, are limited to the simpler querying of manually maintained models.