With more than 32% of the global energy used by commercial and residential buildings, there is an urgent need to revisit traditional approaches to Building Energy Management (BEM). With HVAC systems accounting for about 40% of the total energy cost in the commercial sector, we propose a low-complexity DRL-based model with multi-input multi-output architecture for the HVAC energy optimization of open-plan offices, which uses only a handful of controllable and accessible factors. The efficacy of our solution is evaluated through extensive analysis of the overall energy consumption and thermal comfort levels compared to a baseline system based on the existing HVAC schedule in a real building. This comparison shows that our method achieves 37% savings in energy consumption with minimum violation (<1%) of the desired temperature range during work hours. It takes only a total of 40 minutes for 5 epochs (about 7.75 minutes per epoch) to train a network with superior performance and covering diverse conditions for its low-complexity architecture; therefore, it easily adapts to changes in the building setups, weather conditions, occupancy rate, etc. Moreover, by enforcing smoothness on the control strategy, we suppress the frequent and unpleasant on/off transitions on HVAC units to avoid occupant discomfort and potential damage to the system. The generalizability of our model is verified by applying it to different building models and under various weather conditions.

A mobile app uses artificial intelligence to identify the bird species and store the close up pictures. "We had pretty ambitious goals for the …

FILE - In this Monday, Sept. 12, 2016, file photo, a self-driving Uber sits ready to take journalists for a ride during a media preview in Pittsburgh. Ride-hailing company Uber Technologies Inc., announced Monday, Sept. 19, that the company will soon open an office in Detroit. The San Francisco-based company wouldn't confirm where the facility will be located or how many people will work there, but ties between Detroit and Silicon Valley are growing as research into self-driving cars accelerates.