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Multiagent cooperation is one of the most attractive research fields in multiagent systems. There are many attempts made by researchers in this field to promote cooperation behavior. However, several issues still exist, such as complex interactions among different groups of agents, redundant communication contents of irrelevant agents, which prevents the learning and convergence of agent cooperation behaviors. To address the limitations above, a novel method called multiagent hierarchical cognition difference policy (MA-HCDP) is proposed in this paper. It includes a hierarchical group network (HGN), a cognition difference network (CDN), and a soft communication network (SCN). HGN is designed to distinguish different underlying information of diverse groups’ observations (including friendly group, enemy group, and object group) and extract different high-dimensional state representations of different groups. CDN is designed based on a variational auto-encoder to allow each agent to choose its neighbors (communication targets) adaptively with its environment cognition difference. SCN is designed to handle the complex interactions among the agents with a soft attention mechanism. The results of simulations demonstrate the superior effectiveness of our method compared with existing methods.

To enhance the prediction performance for building energy consumption, this paper presents a modified deep belief network (DBN) based hybrid model. The proposed hybrid model combines the outputs from the DBN model with the energy-consuming pattern to yield the final prediction results. The energy-consuming pattern in this study represents the periodicity property of building energy consumption and can be extracted from the observed historical energy consumption data. The residual data generated by removing the energy-consuming pattern from the original data are utilized to train the modified DBN model. The training of the modified DBN includes two steps, the first one of which adopts the contrastive divergence (CD) algorithm to optimize the hidden parameters in a pre-train way, while the second one determines the output weighting vector by the least squares method. The proposed hybrid model is applied to two kinds of building energy consumption data sets that have different energy-consuming patterns (daily-periodicity and weekly-periodicity). In order to examine the advantages of the proposed model, four popular artificial intelligence methods—the backward propagation neural network (BPNN), the generalized radial basis function neural network (GRBFNN), the extreme learning machine (ELM), and the support vector regressor (SVR) are chosen as the comparative approaches. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DBN based hybrid model has the best performance compared with the comparative techniques. Another thing to be mentioned is that all the predictors constructed by utilizing the energy-consuming patterns perform better than those designed only by the original data. This verifies the usefulness of the incorporation of the energy-consuming patterns. The proposed approach can also be extended and applied to some other similar prediction problems that have periodicity patterns, e.g., the traffic flow forecasting and the electricity consumption prediction.

Building energy consumption prediction plays an important role in improving the energy utilization rate through helping building managers to make better decisions. However, as a result of randomness and noisy disturbance, it is not an easy task to realize accurate prediction of the building energy consumption. In order to obtain better building energy consumption prediction accuracy, an extreme deep learning approach is presented in this paper. The proposed approach combines stacked autoencoders (SAEs) with the extreme learning machine (ELM) to take advantage of their respective characteristics. In this proposed approach, the SAE is used to extract the building energy consumption features, while the ELM is utilized as a predictor to obtain accurate prediction results. To determine the input variables of the extreme deep learning model, the partial autocorrelation analysis method is adopted. Additionally, in order to examine the performances of the proposed approach, it is compared with some popular machine learning methods, such as the backward propagation neural network (BPNN), support vector regression (SVR), the generalized radial basis function neural network (GRBFNN) and multiple linear regression (MLR). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has the best prediction performance in different cases of the building energy consumption.