Building an Intelligent Laboratory Environment via a Cyber-Physical System

Activities in laboratories, workshops, and offices can be significantly affected by their ambiance and environmental conditions, such as lighting, humidity, and temperature. This research focuses on laboratories and aims to improve people’s performance of activities inside them. To this end, we have developed a cyber-physical system (CPS) for a smart/intelligent laboratory environment which is able to dynamically and automatically interpret and regulate environmental conditions. In this paper, we present the CPS development framework. The proposed CPS can measure, analyze, and regulate the thermal comfort. In order to prolong the lifetime of the system, mechanisms for low-volume communication, distributed computation, and habit-based adaptive control are proposed. Evaluations of an on-site deployment verify the functionality of the proposed CPS. Although our focus is on laboratories, this research can be applied to other similar environments, which are intended to support human performance and productivity, and has implications for the creation of smart cities. 1. Introduction Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) contain numerous distributed, linked, and autonomously operated sensor and actuator nodes [1–5]. Generally, CPS can be used to gather adequate information about the physical environment via sensors and eventually provide useful and prompt services for people via actuators and computers. From the system perspective, computation, communication, and control are integrated in CPS, in order to manipulate cyber/physical devices in response to data fed from sensors. Results showed that CPS can be used for indoor applications [6–8]. Despite this, CPSs have seldom been seeing used in improving and maintaining performance of activities in schools and laboratories. Activities carried out in laboratories have become increasingly sophisticated and highly complicated. Different technologies have been proposed to integrate tools and services for the management of laboratories [9–11]. However, existing technologies are mainly about facilitating analytic activities (e.g., data collection, measurement, and interpretation) and postanalytic activities (e.g., reporting of results). As with any performance-based environment, the ambiance and environmental conditions of a laboratory can significantly affect the result of experiments and other activities carried out with it. For examples, people have to work with different hazardous chemical substances (i.e., solvents, catalysts, reagents, and products) and environment-sensitive equipment. Variations in the laboratory