Towards an Agent Based Framework for Modelling Smart Self-Sustainable Systems

Abstract

Self-sustainability is a property of a system; a system is considered to be self-sustainable if it can sustain itself without external support in an observed period of time. If this property is mapped to a human settlement in context of resources (water, energy, food, etc.), it would describe a human settlement which is independent of external resources (like the national electrical grid or a central water distribution system), where such external resources are either not available, or not desirable.This article contributes to presenting the state-of-the-art overview of self-sustainability-related research. While self-sustainability as in the above described form was not a direct subject of research, there are several fields which are either related to, or could be of significant value to the self-sustainability research in this context. The extensive literature overview also showed no frameworks for modeling self-sustainable systems in the context of human settlements. Herein a motivation for using agent-based modeling and simulation techniques will be given.

Towards an Open Ontology for Renewable Resource Management in Smart Self-Sustainable Human Settlements

“…Self-sustainability as defined in this paper has only recently induced explicit research efforts in forms of modelling and simulations of human settlements which directly facilitate such property [Tomičić and Schatten, 2015, Tomičić and Schatten, 2016, Tomicic and Schatten, 2016. Authors have demonstrated that a software framework based on the multi-agent modelling paradigm has the ability to model and simulate selfsustainable human settlements, and the ability to prolong the self-sustainability period of such settlements by using dedicated mechanisms working together across multiple dwelling units, sharing a common top-level goal [Tomičić and Schatten, 2016].…”

“…where A stands for photovoltaic system-to-load, B for storage-to-load, and C for gridto-load [e Silva and Hendrick, 2016]. In complement to the self-sustainability described by authors in [Tomičić and Schatten, 2015, Tomičić and Schatten, 2016, Tomicic and Schatten, 2016, where the self-sustainability is modeled as a binary property, the presented formula clearly illustrates the degree to which the system is self-sustainable in respect to the resources used from outside the system itself.…”