Motivational Psychology Driven AC Management Scheme: A Responsive Design Approach

Abstract

Global warming, and the resultant climate change, has become an urgent global issue. One potential partial solution to this problem and the focus of this paper is to design energy management mechanisms for buildings that encourage users’ acceptance of the technology for increased environmental sustainability. Particularly, this paper focuses on the design of an energy management technique for the air-conditioning (AC) systems in residential buildings that considers users’ views on how they use such technology. Note that while a large number of energy management mechanisms are available in the literature for ACs, most of these studies, however, do not consider how well the users may accept their use in the building. To address this issue, this paper first synthesizes some motivational psychology literature to understand users’ attitudes toward adopting such management techniques for the ACs within the building. Then, the obtained insights from various motivational models are incorporated into the design of an energy management scheme that encourages consumers to accept the technology that reduces electricity consumption, the cost of electricity, peak power from the grid; and the generation of CO2 in the residential building. Finally, some experimental results are provided to illustrate how the designed energy management mechanism validates the motivational psychology models in terms of providing various benefits to the users, and thus shows the potential of being accepted by them.