Personality-based normative feedback intervention for energy conservation

Abstract Residential sector is considered as a key to energy conservation due to its significant share and fast growth. Normative feedback has been widely implemented in residential sector for its low cost and high effectivity. However, the potential of energy saving generated from the method has not been fully achieved, as the influence of personality traits and benchmark setting strategy on individual behavioral response has been overlooked. Therefore, this paper incorporates personality traits into the analysis of individual behavior patterns, and proposes a personality-based normative feedback mechanism which optimizes the benchmarks setting strategy in real time by optimal control algorithm. The agent-based modelling method is adopted to develop improved Deffuant-optimal control (DOC) model and to simulate the personality-driven energy conservation of residents under the proposed intervention mechanism. The study finds that intervention effect of the dynamic benchmark setting strategy is superior to normative feedback with fixed benchmarks in terms of energy savings and response agility, and individuals with different personality traits are significantly different in behavioral characteristics. Increase in openness promotes the residents to save energy quickly, and agreeableness has an inverted U-shaped relationship with residents' response agility. Open-minded and agreeable individuals perform well in energy saving while showing stronger boomerang effect. In addition, residents are classified according to their behavioral response patterns and personality traits, in order to analyze the time-dependent response characteristics and boomerang effect of different groups of individuals. The DOC model is evaluated by energy conservation experiments conducted in residential communities of Hangzhou, China. The proposed intervention mechanism improves the effectivity of normative feedback in both short-term and long-term, and provides an innovation approach for optimizing energy demand side management.