Advice Provision for Energy Saving in an Automobile Climate-Control System

Reducing energy consumption of cli mate-control systems is important in order to reduce the human environmen tal footprint. The need to save energy becomes even greater when considering an electric car, since heavy use of the cli mate-control system may exhaust the battery. In this article we consider a method for an automated agent to pro vide drivers with advice that will moti vate them to reduce the energy con sumption of their climate-control unit. Our approach takes into account both the energy consumption of the climate control system and the expected comfort level of the driver. We therefore have built two models, one for assessing the energy consumption of the climate-con trol system as a function of the system’s settings, and the other for modeling the human comfort level as a function of the climate-control system’s settings. Using these models, the agent provides advice to the driver considering how to set the climate-control system. The agent advises settings that try to pre serve a high level of comfort while con suming as little energy as possible. We empirically show that drivers equipped with our agent, which provides them with advice, significantly save energy as compared to drivers not equipped with our agent.