Large Language Model-Driven Context-Aware Eco-Feedback Generation and Evaluation

The objective of this study is to demonstrate the potential of generating context-aware eco-feedback - eco-feedback that reflects a household's contextual characteristics alongside its energy use patterns - through a large language model-integrated framework. Previous studies have introduced personalized eco-feedback, mostly relying on household energy use patterns; however, they frequently did not reflect distinct household characteristics, including their persona or non-negotiable routines, leaving eco-feedback ineffective and sometimes superficial. To address these limitations, we introduce a contextual engineering framework that generates eco-feedback using a self-consistency with chain-of-thought prompt, leveraging household energy analysis data, utility rate structures, and household characteristic information. We conducted a rigorous empirical validation and a combinatorial evaluation analysis to assess this framework systematically. The former tested the framework's ability to generate accurate and contextually grounded eco-feedback for three households by comparing its output against reference interventions independently derived from the same household data. The latter examined the framework's adaptability across 400 scenarios spanning 50 households, two utility rate structures, and four behavioral personas. Our framework generated eco-feedback that aligned with reference interventions at a mean rate of 92.0% and grounded its recommendations in the provided household data with 95.7% citation accuracy. It also proved highly adaptive, shifting both the appliances targeted and the energy-saving strategies recommended in response to rate structure and household context. Ultimately, this study contributes to realizing the next level of context-aware interactions between occupants and buildings which paves the way for higher occupant living quality and sustainability.