smartSDH: An Experimental Study of Mechanism Based Building Control
This work addresses the challenge of designing IoT control systems for shared resources like smart buildings, but it is incremental as it tests an existing mechanism in a new context and reveals practical limitations.
The study tackled the problem of controlling shared lighting in an office using a VCG mechanism to reconcile stakeholder preferences, but found that participants became significantly less satisfied with both light brightness and incentives over a 5-month experiment.
As Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are increasingly being deployed, situations frequently arise where multiple stakeholders must reconcile preferences to control a shared resource. We perform a 5-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; assuming users are rational, it incentivizes truthful reporting, implements the socially desirable outcome, and compensates participants to ensure higher payoffs under smartSDH when compared with the default outside option(i.e., the option chosen in the absence of such a 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. Although previous studies on the theoretical aspects of the mechanism indicate user satisfaction, our experiments indicate quite the contrary. We found that the participants were significantly less satisfied with light brightness and incentives determined by the VCG mechanism over time. These data suggest the need for more realistic behavioral models to design IoT technologies and highlights difficulties in estimating preferences from observable external factors such as atmospheric conditions.