Project description
Recently, China launched a National Key Research and Development Program entitled new generation intelligent building platform techniques (2017.07–2020.12) with Grant No. 2017YFC0704100. Such category of programs is the top tier of scientific projects sponsored by the Chinese government, which reflects the prior research direction national wide. A typical financial amount of such project is around 10 million US dollars and it will involve many partners diverse from universities, research institutes, industrial companies, etc.
The aim of this project (Grant No. 2017YFC0704100) is to introduce advanced information and control technologies including system modeling, decentralized control and optimization, Internet of Things (IoT) to address the challenges arising from the intelligent operation of building devices in a highly dynamical environment. The paradigm of decentralized control and optimization is the key feature of this new building platform. In the decentralized framework of smart buildings, there does not exist a centralized node or computer to coordinate the whole control system. All the nodes in the building are at a peer level and they are self-organized together to accomplish various functions of the building. This decentralized framework of ICT can alleviate the deficiencies caused by the traditional centralized control schemes, such as the difficulties of automatic configuration and deployment, self-organization, scalability, robustness, etc. As illustrated in Fig. 2, the new framework of the decentralized operating system is composed of many building space units, which are working in a self-organized way. Each unit in the topology of the right side of Fig. 2 includes many intelligent building devices, such as sensors and actuators of buildings. More importantly, each space unit has a computing node, which monitors and controls all the devices inside this space unit. Computing nodes also communicate with its neighbors in a peer-to-peer way, which makes the total operating system work in a decentralized style.
Some deliveries of this project include a decentralized operating system for smart buildings and intelligent electromechanical devices working in decentralized form. The system will be deployed in at least 5 demonstration buildings, more than 100,000 square meters. These buildings are commercial complexes and located in different climate zones of China, two in South China, one in East China, and two in North China. The operating system should accommodate more than 5000 intelligent nodes, 30 types of electromechanical devices, and 20 software applications. The accumulative localization errors of indoor occupants should be less than 10%.
Project partners
Prof. Qianchuan Zhao from the Center for Intelligent and Networked Systems (CFINS), Department of Automation, Tsinghua University is the PI of the project. Prof. Jili Zhang and Prof. Guowei Wu from Dalian University of Technology, Prof. Jianchun Xing and Prof. Qiliang Yang from PLA University of Science and Technology, Prof. Qiansheng Fang and Prof. Zhenya Zhang from Anhui Jianzhu University, and Dr. Ziyan Jiang from Tsinghua University are Co-PIs. The team also includes researchers and engineers from China Academy of Building Research, China Institute of Building Standard Design & Research, China Architecture Design Group and other industrial partners. The industrial partners have three types of companies. One type is the real estate companies, such as China Resources (Holdings), which provide demonstration buildings to deploy our technology developed in this project. The second type is the manufacturers of building devices, such as Gree Electric Appliances and Sinro Air-Conditioning Company, which provide the manufacturing of intelligent building devices. The third type is the system integrators, such as Tsinghua Tongfang, which deploy the whole system to demonstration buildings.
Discussion and evaluation
The team employs cyber-physical systems (CPS) as the overall modeling framework. The advantage of this strategy is that the physics underlying building dynamics can be explicitly considered. A new architecture of building control and management systems will be developed to reduce design, deployment, and maintenance cost. Different from traditional way of developing building control systems as shown in Fig. 3a, by considering physics side of buildings, general purpose building control programs will be developed on top of a general purpose building operating system, as shown in Fig. 3b. The building operating system needs to hide the diversified structures of individual buildings and present interfaces to the general purpose building control and management programs (application programs) to access the abstract model of buildings. The application programs are developed based on standard building models instead of specific buildings.