TY  - JOUR
TI  - Tenant Privacy in Occupancy-Based Energy Control: A Privacy-Preserving Governance Architecture for Smart Building Actuation
AU  - Smart World Journal Editorial Desk (Sophia Bennett, editorial pseudonym)
JO  - Smart World Journal
SN  - 3070-6270
VL  - 1
IS  - 1
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026-11-03
UR  - https://smartworldjournal.com/issues/vol1/articles/article13.html
AB  - Occupancy-based HVAC control can reduce heating and cooling demand, yet the same control logic depends on signals that may reveal tenant presence, absence, routines, and room use. This article examines how occupancy-sensitive control can be retained while limiting disclosure across sensing, collaborative model training, update validation, and runtime actuation. The evidence base is a targeted narrative synthesis rather than a systematic review. One smart-building governance study is used as direct scenario evidence because it evaluates runtime admission control for AI-driven climate control and reports that, in its studied loop, the remaining avoidable unsafe exposure is driven by the policy’s estimate of occupancy context. Transferable methodological support is drawn from federated-learning studies in IoT and industrial sensor systems that address data locality, differential privacy, secure aggregation, homomorphic protection, blockchain-assisted update validation, communication efficiency, and poisoning robustness. On that basis, the manuscript proposes Privacy-Preserving Occupancy Governance for HVAC (PPOG-HVAC), a two-plane architecture: a learning plane for local occupancy estimation under privacy-preserving federation, and a runtime plane for command admission under equipment, metadata, uncertainty, model-freshness, and privacy-state conditions. The paper provides operational definitions, an exact fallback rule, state transitions for privacy-budget exhaustion, comparator conditions, outcome formulas, and a prospective closed-loop evaluation protocol. No empirical building performance is claimed. The contribution is a technically explicit, falsifiable design for subsequent testing of privacy, safety, comfort, and overhead trade-offs in occupied buildings.
N1  - Editorial pseudonym; responsible editor and original credit: Roman Vlasov. Not a separately verified researcher.
ER  -