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Rapid urbanization across the world has led to an exponential increase in demand for utilities, electricity, gas and water. The building infrastructure sector is one of the largest global consumers of electricity and thereby one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing building energy consumption directly contributes to achieving energy sustainability, emissions reduction, and addressing the challenges of a warming planet, while also supporting the rapid urbanization of human society. Energy Conservation Measures (ECM) that are digitalized using advanced sensor technologies are a formal approach that is widely adopted to reduce the energy consumption of building infrastructure. Measurement and Verification (M&V) protocols are a repeatable and transparent methodology to evaluate and formally report on energy savings. As savings cannot be directly measured, they are determined by comparing pre-retrofit and post-retrofit usage of an ECM initiative. Given the computational nature of M&V, artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms can be leveraged to improve the accuracy, efficiency, and consistency of M&V protocols. However, AI has been limited to a singular performance metric based on default parameters in recent M&V research. In this paper, we address this gap by proposing a comprehensive AI approach for M&V protocols in energy-efficient infrastructure. The novelty of the framework lies in its use of all relevant data (pre and post-ECM) to build robust and explainable predictive AI models for energy savings estimation. The framework was implemented and evaluated in a multi-campus tertiary education institution setting, comprising 200 buildings of diverse sensor technologies and operational functions. The results of this empirical evaluation confirm the validity and contribution of the proposed framework for robust and explainable M&V for energy-efficient building infrastructure and net zero carbon emissions.

Traffic congestion continues to be a persistent problem throughout the world. As vehicle-to-vehicle communication develops, there is an opportunity of using cooperation among close proximity vehicles to tackle the congestion problem. The intuition is that if vehicles could cooperate opportunistically when they come close enough to each other, they could, in effect, spread themselves out among alternative routes so that vehicles do not all jam up on the same roads. Our previous work proposed a decentralized multiagent based vehicular congestion management algorithm entitled Congestion Avoidance and Route Allocation using Virtual Agent Negotiation (CARAVAN), wherein the vehicles acting as intelligent agents perform cooperative route allocation using inter-vehicular communication. This paper focuses on evaluating the practical applicability of this approach by testing its robustness and performance (in terms of travel time reduction), across variations in: (a) environmental parameters such as road network topology and configuration; (b) algorithmic parameters such as vehicle agent preferences and route cost/preference multipliers; and (c) agent-related parameters such as equipped/non-equipped vehicles and compliant/non-compliant agents. Overall, the results demonstrate the adaptability and robustness of the decentralized cooperative vehicles approach to providing global travel time reduction using simple local coordination strategies.

Smart meters allow real-time monitoring and collection of power consumption data of a consumer's premise. With the worldwide integration of smart meters, there has been a substantial rise in concerns regarding threats to consumer privacy. The exposed fine-grained power consumption data results in behaviour leakage by revealing the end-user's home appliance usage information. Previously, researchers have proposed approaches to alter data using perturbation, aggregation or hide identifiers using anonymization. Unfortunately, these techniques suffer from various limitations. In this paper, we propose a privacy preserving architecture for fine-grained power data in a smart grid. The proposed architecture uses generative adversarial network (GAN) and an obfuscator to generate a synthetic timeseries. The proposed architecture enables to replace the existing appliance signature with appliances that are not active during that period while ensuring minimum energy difference between the ground truth and the synthetic timeseries. We use real-world dataset containing power consumption readings for our experiment and use non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) algorithms to show that our approach is more effective in preserving the privacy level of a consumer's power consumption data.