We consider the problem of assessing the sustainability of alternative designs (e.g., for an urban environment) that are assembled from multiple components (e.g., water supply, transportation system, shopping centers, commercial spaces, parks). We model the sustainability of a design in terms of a set of sustainability attributes. Given the (qualitative) preferences and tradeoffs of decision makers over the sustainability attributes, we formulate the problem of identifying sustainable designs as the problem of finding the most preferred designs with respect to those preferences. We show how techniques for representing and reasoning with qualitative preferences can be used to identify the most preferred designs based on the decision maker’s stated preferences and tradeoffs.

A method is introduced to incorporate sustainability considerations in the early design stages, while simultaneously accounting for supply chain factors, such as cost and lead time. Overall, this work is our first step in understanding the trade-offs between sustainability metrics and more traditional supply chain performance metrics (i.e., cost and lead time). Based on our understanding of these trade-offs, we intend to help build computational artificial intelligence tools that can exploit these trade-offs for improved customization in produc

One of the challenges in accurately applying metrics for life cycle assessment lies in accounting for both irreducible and inherent uncertainties in how a design will perform under real world conditions. This paper presents a preliminary study that compares two strategies, one simulation-based and one set-based, for propagating uncertainty in a system. These strategies for uncertainty propagation are then aggregated. This work is conducted in the context of an amorphous photovoltaic (PV) panel, using data gathered from the National Solar Radiation Database, as well as realistic data collected from an experimental hardware setup specifically for this study. Results show that the influence of various sources of uncertainty can vary widely, and in particular that solar radiation intensity is a more significant source of uncertainty than the efficiency of a PV panel. This work also shows both set-based and simulation-based approaches have limitations and must be applied thoughtfully to prevent unrealistic results. Finally, it was found that aggregation of the two uncertainty propagation methods provided faster results than either method alone.

Thus, design knowledge and a description of the desired product existing product environmental impact assessment to automatically synthesize potential solutions. This work approaches are most beneficial to implementing changes focuses on a morphological matrix based approach that during the detailed design phase. In addition, impacts due operates on information stored in a design repository to to materials choices, manufacturing processes utilized, and output high-level descriptions of possible solutions. The transportation of an existing product can be evaluated and following section describes the data source and concept reduced. It has been recognized, however, that generation algorithm.

The research project here described aims to contribute to the issue of sustainability of buildings by improving the architectural design process with the development of a decision support tool for the architect. In particular, the research adopts the improvement of existing designs, namely encouraging energy-efficient redesigns while improving indoor environmental quality as its strategy to promote sustainability. Redesign strategy is considered not only to extend the life cycle of a building but also to contribute to the realization of the overall transition towards an efficient and clean climate. The starting point for this research is the question of how to develop an integral framework which enables the modelling of design knowledge through more energy-efficient dwellings with acceptable indoor comfort in the sustainability context so that it would be possible to deal with qualitative, quantitative, complex and contradictory information at the same time and integrate these into design decision-making processes. This modelling approach is considered to provide a link to developing a tool or a link to be embedded in an existing tool. In the development of such an approach, how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can facilitate an integral understanding of the aspects is raised as a methodological question in terms of information processing and knowledge integration in the form of a design decision support tool. By this way it will be possible to assess the performance of the end result with respect to design choices, beforehand.

The paper describes the first phase of development of a Case-Base Reasoning (CBR) system to support early conceptual design of buildings. As specific context of application, the research focuses on energy performance of commercial buildings, and the early identification of energy-related features that contribute to its outcomes. The hypothesis is that bringing knowledge from relevant precedents may facilitate this identification process, thus offering a significant contribution for early analysis and decision-making. The paper introduces a proof-of-concept for such a system, proposing a novel integration of Case-Based Reasoning, Parametric Modeling (Building Information Modeling), and Ontology Classification. Potential advantages and limitations of this three-level integration approach are discussed along with recommendations for future development.

Buildings designed around occupant A sustainable home is more than a green building: it is also intelligence will provide flexible, adaptive task a living experience that encourages occupants to use fewer environments, refined control zones and technologies that resources more effectively. Research has shown that small maximize occupants' access to adaptive opportunities changes in behaviour in how we use our homes, such as (Cole & Brown, 2009). Architects, engineers and system turning off lights, reducing heat and uncovering or designers are faced with the challenge of reframing design covering windows, or shortening showers, can result in strategies as a co-evolution of human and building substantial energy and water savings. But changing the intelligence that will encourage as well as underpin way we use resources is proving challenging.

Traditional machine-learned ranking systems for web search are often trained to capture stationary relevance of documents to queries, which has limited ability to track non-stationary user intention in a timely manner. In recency search, for instance, the relevance of documents to a query on breaking news often changes significantly over time, requiring effective adaptation to user intention. In this paper, we focus on recency search and study a number of algorithms to improve ranking results by leveraging user click feedback. Our contributions are three-fold. First, we use real search sessions collected in a random exploration bucket for \emph{reliable} offline evaluation of these algorithms, which provides an unbiased comparison across algorithms without online bucket tests. Second, we propose a re-ranking approach to improve search results for recency queries using user clicks. Third, our empirical comparison of a dozen algorithms on real-life search data suggests importance of a few algorithmic choices in these applications, including generalization across different query-document pairs, specialization to popular queries, and real-time adaptation of user clicks.

We present a fast, fully parameterizable GPU implementation of Convolutional Neural Network variants. Our feature extractors are neither carefully designed nor pre-wired, but rather learned in a supervised way. Our deep hierarchical architectures achieve the best published results on benchmarks for object classification (NORB, CIFAR10) and handwritten digit recognition (MNIST), with error rates of 2.53%, 19.51%, 0.35%, respectively. Deep nets trained by simple back-propagation perform better than more shallow ones. Learning is surprisingly rapid. NORB is completely trained within five epochs. Test error rates on MNIST drop to 2.42%, 0.97% and 0.48% after 1, 3 and 17 epochs, respectively.

This paper introduces a principled approach for the design of a scalable general reinforcement learning agent. Our approach is based on a direct approximation of AIXI, a Bayesian optimality notion for general reinforcement learning agents. Previously, it has been unclear whether the theory of AIXI could motivate the design of practical algorithms. We answer this hitherto open question in the affirmative, by providing the first computationally feasible approximation to the AIXI agent. To develop our approximation, we introduce a new Monte-Carlo Tree Search algorithm along with an agent-specific extension to the Context Tree Weighting algorithm. Empirically, we present a set of encouraging results on a variety of stochastic and partially observable domains. We conclude by proposing a number of directions for future research.