Achieving Quality and Coherent Configuration and Operations

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This grant provides funding for the configuration and operation of complex systems using intelligent and secure buildings (e.g., offices, factories, malls, hospitals, schools, and apartments) as the background. The problem is important but difficult, and has profound societal impact such as in saving lives, preserving property, generating economic value, and reducing costs. With building traffic (elevators and stairs) as the problem context, our goal is to establish methodologies that are coherent across models, solutions, and phases for various combinations along the mode (normal and emergency) and resolution (coarse and detailed) axes while considering the interactions of building traffic with HVAC. The key idea is to synergistically integrate computer science and optimization. First, formal semantics that is sufficiently expressive and amenable to formal treatment will be developed to analyze and validate composite optimization models for buildings. Distributed models will then be created with coherency guarantees among models, solutions, and phases. To solve the problem, a decomposition and coordination approach will be established. It will synergistically integrate a novel price-based coordination scheme based on surrogate optimization with constraint programming techniques to fuse selected solver fragments. Formal semantics will then be used to combine models, methods, and phases for a seamless and coherent approach across resolutions and modes. The results will be validated on a virtual test bed. If successful, the results of this research will provide a systematic framework and a valuable set of methods for building designers, operators, and first responders for the coherent and optimized configuration and operation of buildings. They will also be used to support the investigation of next generation policies, standards, and procedures. The results can also be extended for the configuration and operation of other complex systems such as security monitoring, vehicles, and aircraft. From a different perspective, the research will open up a new direction for the synergistic integration of computer science and optimization to address the fundamental issues of multi-resolution and multi-mode modeling and optimization. The overall goal is to establish a framework toward coherent configuration and operation of complex systems while attracting and educating students in general, and to achieve economically sustainable intelligent and secure buildings in particular.