Strategy-proof thermal comfort voting in buildings

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.