PI: Katherine Flanigan
Co-PI(s): Mario Bergés, Christopher McComb
University: Carnegie Mellon University
Industry partner: Robert Bosch LLC
Social infrastructure and shared spaces are an essential class of infrastructure that supports social interaction and contributes to community wellbeing. Social infrastructure touches several of the key infrastructure domain areas of interest to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (e.g., facilities, transportation systems, public health). However, social infrastructure and its role in supporting community wellbeing is under stress in many parts of the United States, including Pittsburgh. There is an urgent need to advance the scientific understanding of social infrastructure function (i.e., how it is used) and to quantify community benefits. We propose that the classical sense, learn/plan, and act functionalities present in traditional cyber-physical systems (CPS) be extended to improve social infrastructure performance by accounting for community and social objectives. As a tractable testbed from which to build a foundational framework, we propose the development of a cyber-physical-social system (CPSS) prototype used to improve the productivity, efficiency, and comfort of occupants using shared spaces in academic buildings, subject to consideration of energy use. The prototype system will integrate data produced by research-grade occupancy estimation solutions and environmental sensors with the existing building automation system infrastructure to inform the space utilization decisions of occupants via a digital interface based on their personal preferences. The collaborating partner, Bosch, intends for this work to pave the way for a new CPSS paradigm that will open immense possibilities for extending their own CPS solutions.