Incentive Mechanism for Truthful Occupant Comfort Feedback in Human-in-the-loop Building Thermal Management

Energy inefficiency and underlying occupant discomfort associated with building thermal management systems have led to the development of a human-in-the-loop control system. Minimizing total energy use and maximizing comfort of all the occupants present is the major objective of such system based on human comfort feedback. However, the approaches proposed so far lack a built-in mechanism to elicit truthful comfort feedback from the occupants. In this paper, we utilize an incentive-based mechanism design framework to elicit true thermal comfort feedback (function) from the occupants present. This requires the building occupants to “purchase” or spend credits to achieve their personalized comfort levels within their zone of occupancy. The comfort pricing policy has been derived as an extension of the Vickrey–Clarke–Groves pricing. It ensures incentive compatibility of the mechanism, which implies that an occupant acting in self-interest cannot stand to benefit by declaring their comfort function untruthfully. This would hold irrespective of the thermal comfort choices made by the other occupants present in the building. We further propose as to how this mechanism could be implemented in practice with limited comfort feedback complexity, where the building operator would iteratively learn and refine the occupants comfort function based on simple 2-D comfort feedback (preferred temperature setting, and willingness-to-pay value) by the occupant. Simulations using parameters based on our Watervliet experimental facility demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism.