Consensus of Subjective Preferences of Multiple Occupants for Building Energy Management

In the field of building energy management, comfort levels are often targeted with respect to a single occupant. In studies with multiple occupants, either a hierarchical ordering of occupants with their respective preferences are considered or aggregated results with respect to individual preferences are considered. Studies are scarce which consider the subjective preferences of multiple occupants with equal priority. Inspired by generalized Nash bargaining solutions, the proposed approach obtains a fair consensus solution with respect to the preferences of multiple occupants. This approach is implemented on a real-life scenario of zero cost human-based energy retrofit planning for building energy management using several possible approaches to integrate the fair consensus searching with the search for Pareto-optimality pertaining to the multiple objectives characterizing occupant’s comfort. In future, this work can benefit from more physically significant utility functions for each decision-maker which, in turn, can aid the energy policymakers in the long run.