Building Automation by Intelligent Control of its Environment

The fast development of digital technologies has contributed to building industry in the adoption of sophisticated strategies of automation. These strategies are oriented to control of environmental variables in the different parts of a building provided with high standards of performance in terms of both power saving and human comfort aspects. Control strategies can be expressed by means of rules that could be processed by the inference motor of an expert system. The rules of automation in this system will allow for a better integration of devices and will facilitate their interaction with the elements that define the operation of an intelligent building. According to the distributed paradigm currently used in building automation, the expert system located in the supervision computer will carry out specific functions of cooperation and intelligent coordination, reserving control strategies of each building sector for local controllers. As it is shown in this article, the use of technologies based on artificial intelligence to model and control the behavior of building automation systems contributes to optimize its performance in terms of comfort, security and energy saving.