A personalised thermal comfort model using a Bayesian network

Abstract

In this paper, we address the challenge of predicting optimal comfort temperatures of individual users of a smart heating system. At present, such systems use simple models of user comfort when deciding on a set point temperature. These models generally fail to adapt to an individual user’s preferences, resulting in poor estimates of a user’s preferred temperature. To address this issue, we propose a personalised thermal comfort model that uses a Bayesian network to learn and adapt to a user’s individual preferences. Through an empirical evaluation based on the ASHRAE RP-884 data-set, we show that our model is consistently 17.5-23.5% more accurate than current models, regardless of environmental conditions and the type of heating system used. Our model is not limited to a single metric but can also infer information about expected user feedback, optimal comfort temperature and thermal sensitivity at the same time, which can be used to reduce energy used for heating with minimal comfort loss.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Sebastian Stein: orcid.org/0000-0003-2858-8857

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