EAGER: Centralized Control of Large-Scale Distributed Sensor/Actuator Networks: Self-organizing Amorphous Facades

该项目调查了主动建筑立面，通过改变其不透明度和透气性作为环境和用户参数的函数来积极促进节能，有望为网络和物理科学做出巨大贡献。当建筑物的某些部分被加热或冷却但实际上没有使用时，或者当它们被主动冷却时，如果简单地打开一扇窗户就足够了，通常会浪费能源。所提出的“自组织无定形立面”（SOAF）由大量相同的细胞组成，每个细胞都可以改变其不透明度和透气性，感知光线，温度和占用率，并在分布式集体中相互通信。对于复杂的网络物理系统，这有望提供一种新的设计方法，可能适用于一大类系统，因此，将导致在整个社会使用的基础知识。这个高风险，高回报的项目整合了计算机科学和工程的思想，并加入了一点人类生理学和环境科学，为设计，验证，和改进多边协调战略，代理机器人系统。该项目的智力价值在于新的算法，允许人们利用分布式计算，以大大减少的维度，来自系统的数据，以及将系统的低维控制数据转换为高维控制信号的新算法。特别是，本研究的重点是能够识别共享相似时空数据的区域的分布式算法、能够识别时空数据集中的模式和姿态的分布式算法，以及能够自动导出温度和光照全局控制信号的分布式策略的分布式算法。该项目的直接影响将是通过主动照明和通风控制来减少现代建筑的能源足迹。一个相关的影响是引入了使用真正可重构的墙壁来使用空间的新方法。由于其跨学科的性质跨越计算机科学和土木工程及其积极的环境影响，该项目可能会吸引具有广泛背景和兴趣的学生。它将导致教育模块，让学生探索使用传感器，无线技术和算法在建筑物中的能量，传热和太阳能增益，并向学生介绍复杂的网络物理系统的挑战。PI建议向妇女和少数民族进行宣传，并建议通过www.example.com建立一个新的漫画分发机制，使广大观众能够获得CPS的技术成果和环境影响。

This project, investigating active building facades that proactively contribute to energy conservation by changing their opacity and air permeability as a function of environmental and user parameters, promises to contribute strongly to both the cyber and physical sciences. Often energy is wasted when parts of a building are heated or cooled, but are not actually used, or when they are actively cooled if simply opening a window would suffice. The proposed "Self-Organizing Amorphous Facades" (SOAF) consist of a large number of identical cells that can each change their opacity and air permeability, sense light, temperature, and occupancy, and communicate with each other in a distributed collective. For complex cyber physical systems, this promises to provide a novel design methodology that is potentially applicable to a large class of systems and, therefore, will result in foundational knowledge of use to the community at large. This high-risk, high-reward project integrates ideas from computer science and engineering, with a little human physiology and environmental science thrown in, to develop new theoretical foundations for the design, validation, and improvement of coordination strategies for multi-agent robotic systems.The project's intellectual merit lies in novel algorithms that allow one to take advantage of distributed computation to drastically reduce the dimensionality of the data coming from the system, and novel algorithms that turn low-dimensional control data to the system into high-dimensional control signals. In particular, this research focuses on distributed algorithms that can identify regions that share similar spatio-temporal data, distributed algorithms that recognize patterns and gestures in spatio-temporal data sets, and distributed algorithms that automatically derive distributed policies for global control signals on temperature and light.Broader Impacts: The direct impact of this project will be huge potential reduction in the energy footprint of modern buildings by active lighting and ventilation control. A related impact is the introduction of novel ways of using space using truly reconfigurable walls. Due to its interdisciplinary nature spanning computer science and civil engineering together with its positive environment implications, this project is likely to be attractive to students with a broad range of backgrounds and interests. It will lead to educational modules that let students explore energy, heat transfer and solar gains in a building using sensors, wireless technologies, and algorithms, and introduce students to the challenges of complex cyber-physical systems. The PI proposes outreach to women and minorities and suggests a novel mechanism of comic distribution via HowToons.com that will make technical results and environmental impact of CPS accessible to a wide audience.