Demand-based apportionment on electricity payment of hvac systems

Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems account for a significant portion of power consumption in commercial buildings all over the world [1, 4, 5, 6]. Since HVAC systems are designed for centralized cooling supplies, power consumption in each room is inestimable. Therefore, administrators are motivated to apportion the electricity payment for actual users. The even apportionment is an intuitive way. Previous work implies that the even apportionment does not encourage people to reduce power consumption [2]. Some researchers investigate a variety of policies to apportion the power usage and then conclude that understanding the personal energy use is an incentive to reduce power consumption [3]. However, the pay-as-you-go based apportionment is unrealistic on HVAC systems because of the difficulty on measuring the individual power consumption. In addition, climate differences cause the unfairness on the pay-as-you-go based apportionment. The reason is that the two rooms need various amount of cooling supplies to achieve the same indoor temperature. The difference on cooling supplies in the rooms is led by the environment. For example, a room in the top level always needs more supplies against the sun exposure. Under the pay-as-you-go based apportionment, no one wants to use the rooms in the top level. Therefore, we propose the demand-based apportionment to