One Agent per Zone: Decentralised Active Inference under Partial Observability for Multi-Zone HVAC Control on Edge Hardware
Multi-zone HVAC control is a shared-resource problem: zones on a floor share one fan and cooling coil, so each zone's demand affects its neighbours and the building's peak power. One controller per zone scales well and isolates faults, but each controller then observes only its own zone, not the shared air loop. In this work, we present a decentralised controller that assigns each zone an independent active-inference agent, which plans by minimising expected free energy and learns its zone dynamics online. The agents exchange no messages, so none depends on peers or a coordinator; each accounts for the unobserved coupling through a latent disturbance and a congestion signal derived from t...
| Authors | Panagiotis Kasnesis, Lazaros Toumanidis, Christos Chatzigeorgiou et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.MA |
| Published | 14 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 October 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 15 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.