Posts from 2020-07-08

Context Presentation

The purpose of this project is to propose a cooperative agent model, based on the self-adaptive multi-agent system theory (AMAS), allowing an efficient and fast exploration of the parameter space, autonomously and automatically. This exploration should allow a continuous readjustment of the simulation until convergence, improving the control of the macro-level over the micro-level.

On an application standpoint, the purpose of this project is to produce a realistic traffic that satisfies the best a set of objectives and constraints at both micro and macro levels. This traffic should also allow interaction with humans and adapt to events that could occur in the virtual environment. 

Keywords

Self-adaptive Multi-agent Systems, Self-Calibration, Multi-Agent Simulation

Scientific goals

1. Enrich the AMAS theory with general learning mechanisms andstrengthen the coupling between micro and macro levels.

2. Propose a new generic calibration method of models.

3. Enrich GAMA tools

Contacts

damien.vergnet_at_irit.fr, frederic.amblard_at_ut-capitole.fr, elsy.kaddoum_at_irit.fr, nicolas.verstaevel_at_irit.fr

Context Presentation

This project is built in cooperation with Epurtek factory and INRAe who displays planted filters in Occitany, France and other countries. The actual network extends with the help of the regional GIS ‘EAU Toulouse and the national group of water Re-Use from Aqua-Valley and CapEnergy platforms. Major research and innovation issues are: 

1. To obtain and feed a pluri-topic data base from environmental sensors settled down into the filters for in-field, providing a spatially and temporally improved datasets that allows the implementation of deterministic models and open the black boxes of the filters sediment and soil. These models of transport and reaction (ex MIN3P) will describe the water and pollutants flows through the filters. This task started from cooperation between the research labs (UMR ECOLAB) at Toulouse, the university of La Rochelle, and UMR ECO&SOL from Montpellier.

 2. To demonstrate how the invertebrate addition in the filters will improve the purification efficiency in agreement with the biodiversity influence that governs natural ecosystem functioning. Research hypotheses will be tested in filter replicates at the level of lab microcosms, in campus pilots and across-campus comparisons.

 3. The assessment of biodiversity effects on filter benefits and services in terms of water quality providing, water quantity resource management, energy cost, recreational area for campus users, teaching and innovation supports.

 4. To provide a new generation filter that matches with the requirement of the recent European policies about water reuse quality and may be recognized as a new technology for local water cycle in our territories

Keywords

Planted Filter, Water, Biodiversity

Scientific goals

This garden provides the potential to become an outdoor living lab as a demonstrator of sustainable and low carbon solution for wastewater treatment and recycling though nature-based solution. The main challenge is to demonstrate the advantages of having a biodiverse and smart clean garden on a campus or a smart city, in terms of environment, economy, society (quality of life) and energy, by comparison with the classic filters. This implies an adaptative management of the water resource in cooperation with other research laboratories and stakeholders, as public water managers and private factories that wish to favor the ecological and energetic transition in this field.

Contacts

magali.gerino_at_univ-tlse3.fr, oceane.gilibert_at_univ-tlse3.fr, rahim.kacimi_at_irit.fr, arnaud.elger_at_univ-tlse3.fr

Context Presentation

The development of sustainable smart cities requires the deployment of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to ensure better services and available information at any time and everywhere. As IoT devices become more powerful and low-cost, the implementation of an extensive sensor network for an urban context can be expensive.

This thesis addresses the problem of estimating missing information in urban contexts. The objective is to estimate accurate environmental information where physical sensors are not available. The proposed solution, HybridIoT, uses the Adaptive Multi-Agent System (AMAS) to estimate accurate environmental information under conditions of uncertainty arising from the urban application context in which the project is applied, such as openness, heterogeneity and large-scale, which have not been explored by the state-of-the-art solutions.

Keywords

Smart city, Cooperative Multi-Agent Systems, Missing Information Estimation, Heterogeneous Data Integration

Scientific goals

- Limiting the number of ad hoc devices to be deployed in an urban environment

- The exploitation of heterogeneous data acquired from mobile, intermittent devices

- Real-time processing of information

- Self-calibration of the system

Contacts

davide.guastella@irit.fr, Marie-Pierre.Gleizes@irit.fr, valerie.camps@irit.fr

Context Presentation

neOCampus is a large operation with different kinds of projects and actors. Started in 2013, its goal is to improve the university campus user’s everyday life through data analysis for people, fluid consummation reduction, reduce building environmental footprint, etc.… Overall, it tends to make the campus smarter. All those projects have one common point: data. Including images, sensor logs, administrative data, configurations, we can find every kind of data and each must be stored somewhere.

This project is centered around this problem with a data management system architecture which is the data lake.The conception of this kind of solution must include handling every kind of data and making it possible to follow the life of a data from the input to the usage in a project. It does not only have to store every kind of data, it is needed to know what is stored, where and in the proper format to use it in the easiest way. When a new data has arrived, the system will automatically rawly store it, find the more valuable format, extract information from this data and make this knowledge available for any purpose.

 Keywords

Data Lake, Data Driven Project, Big Data, Data Management, Data Analysis

Scientific goal

•    To develop a datalake architecture to change the architecture of the data management system in neOCampus.

Contacts

dang.vincentnam@gmail.com, françois.thiebolt@irit.fr, olivier.teste@irit.fr

Context Presentation

Anomaly detection in real fluid distribution applications is a difficult task, especially when we seek to accurately detect different types of anomalies and possible sensor failures. Our case study is based on a real context: sensor data from the SGE (Rangueil campus management and operation service in Toulouse).

We propose an automatic pattern-based method for anomaly detection in time-series called Composition-based Decision Tree (CDT). We use a modified decision tree and Bayesian optimization to avoid manual tuning of hyper-parameters. Our method uses sequences of patterns to identify remarkable points corresponding to multiple anomalies. The compositions of patterns existing into time-series are learned through an internally generated decision tree and then simplified using Boolean algebra to produce intelligible rules.

Our approach automatically generates decision rules for anomaly detection. All our experiments were carried out on real and synthetic data. We show that our method is precise for classifying anomalies compared to other methods. It also generates rules that can be interpreted and understood by experts and analysts, who they can adjust and modify.

Keywords

Anomaly detection, Time-series, Machine learning, Classification rules

Scientific goals

•    To detect different types of anomalies observed in real deployment

•    To generate interpretable rules for anomaly detection

•    To use learning methods for anomaly detection on static and continuous data

Contact

ines.ben-kraiem@irit.fr

Context Presentation

The current digital transformation requires the creation of autonomous applications that can be adapted to complex, dynamic, heterogeneous, and unpredictable environments. These systems must be equipped with proactive learning capabilities.

To this end, Self-Adaptive Multi-Agent principle allows the decentralization and self-observation of the learning process. Each knowledge granule is an autonomous agent that cooperates with its neighbors to improve learning from exogenous and endogenous feedbacks. Detecting and solving concurrences, conflicts and incompetence leads to active endogenous learning.This work on an adaptive decentralized learning mechanism is applied to the learning of a robotic arm inverse kinematics.

 Keywords

Self-Adaptive Learning, Endogenous Learning, Adaptive Multi-Agent Systems, Robotics

Scientific goals

•    Design a Self-Learning System

•    Lifelong and Endogenous Learning

•    Genericity and Scalability

Contacts

bruno.dato@irit.fr, frederic.migeon@irit.fr, marie-pierre.gleizes@irit.fr

Context Presentation

This research project deals with energy efficiency in buildings to mitigate the climate change. Buildings are the highest source of energy consumption worldwide. However, a large part of this energy is wasted, mainly due to poor buildings management. Therefore, being accurately informed about consumptions and detecting anomalies are essential steps to overcome this problem. Currently, some software exists to record, store, archive, and visualize big data such as the ones of a building, a campus, or a city. Yet, they do not provide Artificial Intelligence (AI) able to automatically analyze the streaming data to detect anomalies and send alerts, as well as adapted reports to the different stakeholders.

The system designed in the SANDFOX project has for objective to fill this gap. To improve the energy management, an innovative system should aim at visualizing the streaming data, editing reports, and detecting anomalies, for different stakeholders, such as policy makers, energy man-agers, researchers, technical staff or end-users of these buildings.

The paper presents the User-Centred Design approach that was used to collect the required needs from different stakeholders. The developed AI system is called SANDMAN (semi-Supervised ANomaly Detection withMulti-AgeNt systems). It processes data in a time constrained manner to detect anomalies as early as possible. SANDMAN is based on the paradigm of self-adaptive multi-agent systems. The results show the robustness of the AI regarding the detection of noisy data, of different types of anomalies, and the scaling.

Keywords

Anomaly detection, dashboard, multi-agent system, smart buildings, energy management

Scientific goals

•    Anomalies detection in smart buildings streaming data by AI,

•    Restitution of the information to different stakeholders through an adapted dashboard.

Contacts

berangere.lartigue@univ-tlse3.fr, stephanie.combettes@irit.fr, marie-pierre.gleizes@irit.fr,  mathieu.raynal@irit.fr

Context Presentation

The measurement of indoor air quality is important for health protection against chemical and gaseous pollutants ... The indoor air can contain many pollutants such as CO, CO2, NO2 and VOCs. These pollutants exist in different materials and products that can be used in housing (furniture, cleaners ...), but can be also coming from human activities or outside source. In this case, the detection, measurement and monitoring of these gazeuse contaminants is necessary.

In view of its high performance and low cost, the innovative gas multi-sensor based on metal oxides semiconductors for analyzing and controlling indoor air quality is a good alternative to electrochemical and infrared sensors. This project is currently in progress in LAAS in collaboration with the LCC and Laplace and as part of a thesis funded by neOCampus and the Occitanie region.

This thesis focuses on the characterization of multiple MOX-based gas sensors and integrates these multi-sensors in electronic card to achieve a connected object to control the indoor air quality in offices and classrooms in University Paul Sabatier in Toulouse. The gas multi-sensor is a microsystem composed by four sensors on a microchip, realized to detect target gases.  

Keywords

Multi-sensors, MOS, Indoor Air Quality, Smart Building, neOCampus

Scientific goals

•    To characterize new nanomaterials (SnO2, CuO, ZnO, WO3 ...) designed by the LCC by using an experimental set-up,

•    To define an operating protocol by trying different operating modes.

Contacts

aymen.sendi@live.fr, menini@laas.fr, pierre.fau@lcc-toulouse.fr, katia.fajerwerg@univ-tlse3.fr, myrtil.kahn@lcc-toulouse.fr, vincent.bley@laplace.univ-tlse.fr

Context Presentation

For several decades, the hot water for heating and domestic hot water has been a major issue because it accounts for approximately 55% of heating needs in France for both commercial and residential buildings. District Heating Systems have been considered as a most economical, efficient, and environmentally friendly solution for providing heating services to the building stock of large cities. This is essentially related to the reason that these systems can use renewable energies.

The Rangueil’s scientific campus, benefits from a superheated water district heating system built in the 1960’s. It has recently been connected to a biomass boiler that covers approximately 82% of the demand. Campus buildings undergoes significant evolutions (renovations, new buildings). The network consists of 4 main loops, 63 primary substations, 97 buildings, 11 km of underground network and cover a surface of 576 000 m². Our aim is to study the performance of this heating system, starting from one heating loop.

Keywords

Rangueil’s District Heating Systems (DHS), Dynamic modeling, MATLAB / Simulink.

Scientific goals

•    The objective is to do a pre-study of the entire system by studying just one loop

•    Identify the parameters influencing the performance of a district heating system

•    Develop on MATLAB / Simulink a model of one loop of the district heating system

•    Analysis of data to identify the impacts of recent evolutions of the network and buildings.

Contacts

khouloud.koteich98@gmail.com, oms@insa-toulouse.fr, moisson@insa-toulouse.fr, francoise.thellier@univ-tlse3.fr

Context Presentation

When it comes to evaluate the quantifiable effects of products or services on the environment, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is probably the most efficient and recognized tool. Thanks to a “cradle to grave” approach, LCA identifies and quantifies, throughout the life of products, the physical flows of matter and energy associated with human activities (extraction of raw materials, manufacturing of the product, distribution, use, collection and disposal towards end-of-life). For each of its flows correspond impact indicators which allow to establish the overall potential impact of the system on our environment. With regard to lighting, “smart” technologies have made it possible to improve energy efficiency during use phase and thus greatly limit its impact on the environment.

Before the development of these new technologies, lighting represented 14% of European consumption and 19% of global electricity consumption (2009). Today, the UNEP (United Nations Environment Program) estimates it at 15 % worldwide (2,940 TWh) for 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions (1,150 million tonnes of CO2). However, despite major advances in terms of energy efficiency, many direct or indirect impacts on our environment, our health, well-being and productivity are not considered, and we can no longer neglect these impacts.

It is then necessary to define a new methodology, which will allow the extension of the classic LCA by taking into account several health and social criteria, in particular regarding the potential ”impacts on human” ( blue light and impacts on circadian rhythms); the "impacts on ecosystems" (light pollution, potential impacts on insects and plants population); the several “uses of light” (residential, commercial, public lighting, etc.); or even "social acceptability on and by the user of the system" (security, comfort, working conditions, etc.). The aggregation of these criteria, with a classic life cycle assessment and a life cycle cost analysis (cumulative cost of a product throughout its life cycle), will give a global vision (economic, social and environmental) of the potential impacts of lighting and will helps to offer a decision support tool for establishing coherent and appropriate strategies around the transformation of our lighting systems.

Keywords

Life Cycle Assessment, LED, Lighting Systems, Environmental Impacts

Scientific goal

•    Evaluating the global impacts of lighting technologies, and helping the decision making regarding lighting strategies.

Contact

kevin.bertin@laplace.univ-tlse.fr