smartSDH: An Experimental Study of Mechanism-Based Building Control

As Internet of Things technologies are increasingly being deployed, situations frequently arise where multiple stakeholders must reconcile preferences to control a shared resource. We perform a five-month long experiment dubbed “smartSDH” (carried out in 27 employees’ office space) where users report their preferences for the brightness of overhead lighting. smartSDH implements a modified Vickrey–Clarke–Groves (VCG) mechanism. smartSDH assesses the feasibility of the VCG mechanism in the context of smart building control and evaluated smartSDH’s effect using metrics such as light level satisfaction, incentive satisfaction, and energy consumption. After the initial eight weeks, we noted that average satisfaction with the light levels dropped from 3.44 to 2.94 on a 5-point Likert scale and that satisfaction with incentives dropped from 3.57 to 3.16. This indicates a participation burnout not typically captured by theoretical analyses of VCG mechanisms. Additionally, our experiment reduced energy consumption by 35.22% over a five-month period, without directly incentivizing lower energy consumption, which provides evidence that much of the current energy consumption may be wasteful. Finally, we observed that environmental readings had statistically significant relationships with the lighting preferences of users, indicating promise for learning preferences from other observable factors.