Social incentive policies to engage commercial building occupants in demand response

Occupants' comfort is the primary target in a building operation. However their efforts are often neglected and ruled out from traditional control strategies of energy-efficient building management systems. Occupant-engaged control strategies have recently attracted many research attentions and demonstrated great potentials for energy saving. With them, occupants' behavior is incorporated into the closed-loop control methods in which their initiatives actively contribute to building services and energy utility by explicitly expressing their preferences. This work proposes an occupant-engaged demand response (DR) strategy for building automation in which occupants are actively engaged to adapt their energy consumption in response to incentive opportunities designed by facility managers. A model-based study and a Nash-Equilibrium-based solution are provided to assist facility managers with the design of social incentive policies to promote occupant participation, along with the guarantee of lucrativeness for a DR event.