Building Efficiency and Sustainability in the Tropics

A building can be an agile, sentient, complex dynamic system that delivers customized sequences of micro-environments to optimize comfort and productivity while minimizing carbon footprint. Such a building leverages pervasive sensing and information technology to realize and maintain tunable physical models, and to synthesize state-of-the-art knowledge about occupant needs and patterns, allowing optimal integration and management. This view introduces modern agile manufacturing principles in building operations, with activities such as process control, fault detection and classification, planning, forecasting and supply chain management when interacting with the grid, the utilities, and the environment. We will address this concept in the context of a newly established research program between UC Berkeley, Nanyang Technological University, National University of Singapore and Singapore's National Research Foundation.

Speaker: Costas Spanos, UC Berkeley