Monitoring building indoors through clustered embedded agents

Future buildings will be smart to support personalized people comfort and building energy efficiency as well as safety, emergency, and context-aware information exchange scenarios. In this work we propose a decentralized and embedded architecture based on agents and wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) for enabling efficient and effective management of buildings. The main purpose of the agent-based architecture is to efficiently support distributed and coordinated sensing and actuation operations. The building management architecture is implemented in MAPS (Mobile Agent Platform for Sun SPOTs), an agent-based framework for programming WSN applications based on the Sun SPOT sensor platform. The proposed architecture is demonstrated in a simple yet effective operating scenario related to monitoring workstation usage in computer laboratories. The high modularity of the proposed architecture allows for easy adaptation of higher-level application-specific agents that can therefore exploit the architecture to implement intelligent building management policies.