Preference Elicitation in DCOPs for Scheduling Devices in Smart Buildings

Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOPs) offer a powerful approach for the description and resolution of cooperative multi-agent problems. In such model a group of agents coordinate their actions to optimize a global objective function, taking into account their preferences and constraints. A core limitation of this model is the assumption that all agents’ preferences are specified a priori. Unfortunately, in a number of application domains, such knowledge is not assumed, and these values may become available only after being elicited from users in the domain. Motivated by the current developments in smart buildings we explore the effect of preference elicitation in scheduling smart appliances within a network of interconnected buildings, with the goal of reducing the users’ energy consumption costs, while taking into account the comfort of the occupants. This paper makes the following contributions: (1) It introduces the Smart Building Devices Scheduling (SBDS) problem and maps it as a DCOP; (2) It proposes a general model for preference elicitation in DCOPs; (3) and It empirically evaluates the effect of several heuristics to select a set of preferences to elicit in SBDS problems.