Solar buildings

A building that has the capacity to control the thermal flow interactions with the outside, the in and out flows, and in addition is able to control the internal thermal flows between adjacent zones, formally acts as a thermodynamic automaton. The automaton rule minimizes the distance of the temperature of the core (living space) from a predetermined desired temperature. The automaton rule must manage the chaotic variations of the external inputs and also its own capacity to learn whether the external inputs belong to summer or winter, etc., because according to season the automaton strategy changes. If backup injection of heating (or cooling) is necessary, how can this be operated? In fact, the building is “alive,” and the injection of energy automatically perturbs the automaton logic; it may fool the automaton into making it believe that it is summer when instead it is winter (or vice versa). A problem of similar nature is known to pilots of highly automated airplanes, for instance in the process of automatic landing, where the intervention of the human action has caused disasters. It is also known in medical science where the introduction of a drug always carries basically unknown side-effects. We are studying the strategy of the “back up” for a class of thermodynamic automata.