Documenting occupant models for building performance simulation: a state-of-the-art

Abstract

The number of occupancy and occupant behaviour models developed for building performance simulation (BPS) has steadily increased for the past four decades. However, their use is still limited in practice. This is partly due to the difficulty in understanding their utility and to the challenges related to their implementation into BPS. Both problems can be attributed to the lack of a framework for their description and communication. In this paper, we fill this gap by introducing a framework to document occupant models, that represents the state-of-the-art of available information on the topic. The framework consists of four blocks (description, development, evaluation, and implementation) and can also be regarded as a guideline to help researchers communicate their models transparently. Based on a systematic review, we verify to which degree existing academic papers on occupant models meet the framework, thus providing a self-critical assessment of the state-of-the-art of occupant models’ documentation.

KEYWORDS:

• Building simulation
• occupancy and occupant behaviour models
• occupant presence and actions models
• evaluation
• documentation

Acknowledgements

Matteo Favero would like to thank the Research Centre on Zero Emission Neighbourhoods in Smart Cities (FME ZEN, Grant n. 257660) and the Research Council of Norway (Norges Forskingsrådet) for their support. Marcel Schweiker is supported by a research grant (21055) from VILLUM FONDEN. Karol Bandurski is supported by a research grant SBAD PB 0948 form Poznan University of Technology. Salvatore Carlucci is supported by the COLLECTiEF project (Collective Intelligence for Energy Flexibility), which has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant agreement no. 101033683. This publication reflects only the authors' view and that any of the funding agencies are not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This research greatly benefitted from IEA EBC Annex 79.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The shrinkage penalty is composed of a penalty term multiplied by a tuning parameter λ.