Policy Design for Controlling Set-Point Temperature of ACs in Shared Spaces of Buildings

摘要

Air conditioning systems are responsible for the major percentage of energyconsumption in buildings. Shared spaces constitute considerable office spacearea, in which most office employees perform their meetings and daily tasks,and therefore the ACs in these areas have significant impact on the energyusage of the entire office building. The cost of this energy consumption,however, is not paid by the shared space users, and the AC's temperatureset-point is not determined based on the users' preferences. This latter factoris compounded by the fact that different people may have different choices oftemperature set-points and sensitivities to change of temperature. Therefore,it is a challenging task to design an office policy to decide on a particularset-point based on such a diverse preference set. As a result, users are notaware of the energy consumption in shared spaces, which may potentiallyincrease the energy wastage and related cost of office buildings. In thiscontext, this paper proposes an energy policy for an office shared space byexploiting an established temperature control mechanism. In particular, wechoose meeting rooms in an office building as the test case and design a policyaccording to which each user of the room can give a preference on thetemperature set-point and is paid for felt discomfort if the set-point is notfixed according to the given preference. On the other hand, users who enjoy thethermal comfort compensate the other users of the room. Thus, the policyenables the users to be cognizant and responsible for the payment on the energyconsumption of the office space they are sharing, and at the same time ensuresthat the users are satisfied either via thermal comfort or through incentives.The policy is also shown to be beneficial for building management. Throughexperiment based case studies, we show the effectiveness of the proposedpolicy.