The Human in the loop in Cyber-Physical Systems: the case of Building Automation

• Autor(a) principal: Cambeiro, João Miguel Reis Araújo Proença
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/96662
• topic: Cyber Physical Systems; Building Automation Systems; Human-in-the-loop; Internet of Things; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Eletrotécnica, Eletrónica e Informática

Context: The world is facing environmental challenges due to carbon dioxide emissions. Building energy consumption accounts for thirty to forty-five per cent of global energy consumption. Changing these figures is imperative for achieving environmental sustainability. Building Automation Systems (BAS) can be considered a type of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) that have the objective of increasing energy efficiency while maximising human comfort. Problem: Automated systems usually do not consider human e↵ective participation as a tool that can be used to achieve the system’s goals Solution: Humans can assume several roles in the available building automation control loops. Building operators determine operating rules; building users can be the source of data used for automated decisions and also the system may require their actions to change the building environment. Gains or losses can be introduced in a BAS operation if humans are considered components of the system. To the best of our knowledge, no studies can be found that show evident gains or losses of integrating the human-in-theloop in system design. To assess the impact of having humans performing clear and predefined roles in a BAS Cyber-Physical System (CPS) operation, we implemented a BAS case study. Results: The initial results show that when the BAS consider humans more than CPS plant’s elements, the BAS is more energy efficient while providing conditions that promote the user’s health and productivity. With the experience gained with this work it will be possible to build in the future more resilient and e↵ective participatory BAS.