Towards Resolving Thermal Comfort Conflicts in Shared Spaces

Abstract

Thermal comfort is an important factor in building control, affecting occupant health, satisfaction, and productivity. Building management systems in commercial spaces commonly operate on predefined temperature setpoints and control strategies. Many systems target aggregated cohort comfort and neglect to consider the individual occupant’s thermal preferences, leading to high dissatisfaction rates. While recent studies focus on personalized comfort models, such systems mainly operate on occupant preference prediction and do not investigate the reasons for discomfort. This paper presents TREATI’s human-in-the-loop decision-making process. TREATI is a framework that targets thermal comfort conflict resolution in shared spaces using rationale management techniques while considering both individual and cohort comfort. TREATI uses several levels of abstraction separating device management, event processing, context, and rationale management. This separation allows users to adapt the framework to existing building management systems to provide fair decision-making.