Development of Collective Intelligence for Building Energy Efficiency

Most studies of energy efficiency in buildings have focused on technical systems and lacked considerations on cooperative solutions by technical systems and occupant behaviour. This chapter presents an innovative collective intelligence model to fill this research gap, where occupants and building energy systems are represented using a society of intelligent agents and Genetic Algorithm (GA) is integrated with it to enhance self-organization, optimisation and cooperation of energy systems actions and occupant behaviour. The utilisation of the collective intelligence model is demonstrated using an apartment building in Australia. The results show that building energy efficiency can be significantly improved through the collective intelligence model. This approach links humans and collective intelligence with building energy systems to tackle the building energy efficiency problem. This chapter advances cross-disciplinary knowledge about the development of artificial intelligence technologies for maximising the potential of energy efficiency in buildings.