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Strategy-proof thermal comfort voting in buildings

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Published:03 November 2014Publication History

ABSTRACT

Commercial building is a major energy consumer worldwide; and the heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) system dominates the total energy consumption. The current practice of the HVAC systems in most commercial buildings is to adopt a fixed temperature setting; and to avoid occupant complaints, building operators usually choose conservative temperatures settings. This leads to massive energy waste; and many times not good in thermal comfort either.

Recently, many works studied the occupant-participatory approach, i.e., occupants can provide their feedback of thermal comforts and a more dynamic temperature adjustment is applied. Though these studies have various optimization objectives, e.g., energy conservation, thermal comfort, or non-intrusiveness, one hidden assumption for all these occupant-participatory approaches is that the occupants are trustworthy, i.e., they do not game the system with false feedback/votes. In this paper, we demonstrate that each occupant can easily have incentives to submit untruthful thermal comfort. We thus propose a strategy-proof framework for thermal comfort voting schemes. We show the conditions for the existence of the strategy-proof voting schemes. In this framework, we classify two types of voting schemes, i.e., individual-based and group-based voting schemes. We propose the strategy-proof voting mechanism for both voting schemes and evaluate their performance via simulation.

References

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  1. Strategy-proof thermal comfort voting in buildings

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM Conferences
      BuildSys '14: Proceedings of the 1st ACM Conference on Embedded Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings
      November 2014
      241 pages
      ISBN:9781450331449
      DOI:10.1145/2674061

      Copyright © 2014 ACM

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 3 November 2014

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