Optimal Open Space Cubicle Assignment Considering Personal Thermal Preferences

It is not easy to provide a thermal environment satisfying all occupants in a shared space owing to individual differences in thermal comfort. Existing research efforts focusing on resolving thermal conflicts in offices with multi-occupants rely on consensus-based temperature setpoints optimization, which causes unfairness among occupants. To cope with this drawback, we propose a method to assign occupants to cubicles where every occupant can enjoy their preferred thermal environment by utilizing the uneven temperature distribution in a shared space with air conditioners. The proposed method accounts for personal thermal comfort differences and uneven temperature distribution in an open office space, and maximizes the aggregate thermal comfort of occupants, by proposing a differential evolution algorithm for the cubicle assignment problem. An application of the proposed method under a space with 30 cubicles is analyzed by assignment simulation of 15 occupants to 30 cubicles. Results show that the proposed method can find every occupant a cubicle matching with their thermal preference among the available cubicles and generate an assignment solution that maximizes the sum of the thermal comfort probabilities of all the occupants. Our investigations demonstrate that cubicle assignment considering personal thermal preferences can discover the potential of current thermal environment for providing personalized thermal conditions for multi-occupants.